Methodology

The production of the national accounts is governed by a set of accounting rules and good practices defined at international level.

Introduction

National and regional accounts are compiled according to the requirements of the "European System of National and Regional Accounts - ESA 2010". A specific section is devoted more generally to the ESA 2010.

As a rule, each statistical publication is accompanied by an overview of the methodological changes made in successive editions.

This section reviews for each statistical field the methodological notes marking the successive editions containing the statistical data. The latest ones relate to the reference framework introduced in 2014 by the ESA 2010. The oldest methodological notes were produced under the compulsory rules of the previous version of the ESA, the ESA 1995.

The EU Member States are also required to supply what are known as “inventories of sources and methods”. These much more detailed documents relate to specific statistical products.  The GNI inventory, devoted to the sources and methods used to estimate gross national income, is an essential document as it enables Eurostat to assess good practice for the estimate of GNI, used in particular to determine the Member States’ contributions to the EU budget.

Finally, the national accounts are accompanied by numerous nomenclatures. A list of the classifications is also available at the end of this section.

Metadata

Inventories of sources and methods

Methodological notes

ESA 2010

ESA 1995

Classifications

Classifications facilitate the international comparison of statistics because they reflect the arrangements made for the systematic and structured classification of the phenomena mapped by statistics. Moreover, they also enable meaningful comparison of a variety of statistics.

When drawing up the national accounts, as the umbrella statistics, a number of classifications are used, of which the most important are listed below: