Regulation (EU) No 549/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 May 2013 on the European system of national and regional accounts in the European Union Text with EEA relevance

Article 1

Subject matter

The ESA 2010 provides for:

(a) a methodology (Annex A) on common standards, definitions, classifications and accounting rules that shall be used for compiling accounts and tables on comparable bases for the purposes of the Union, together with results as required under Article 3;

(b) a programme (Annex B) setting out the time limits by which Member States shall transmit to the Commission (Eurostat) the accounts and tables to be compiled in accordance with the methodology referred to in point (a).

Article 2

Methodology

Article 3

Transmission of data to the Commission

The data shall be transmitted or uploaded by electronic means to the single entry point for data at the Commission. The interchange standard and other practical arrangements for the transmission of the data shall be defined by the Commission by means of implementing acts. Those implementing acts shall be adopted in accordance with the examination procedure referred to in Article 8(2).

Article 4

Quality assessment

Article 5

Date of application and of first transmission of data

Article 6

Derogations

Article 7

Exercise of the delegation

A decision to revoke shall put an end to the delegation of power specified in that Decision. It shall take effect the day following the publication of the decision in the Official Journal of the European Union or at a later date specified therein. It shall not affect the validity of any delegated acts already in force.

Article 8

Committee

Article 9

Cooperation with other committees

Article 10

Transitional provisions

Article 11

Reporting on implicit liabilities

By 2014, the Commission shall submit a report to the European Parliament and to the Council containing existing information on PPPs and other implicit liabilities, including contingent liabilities, outside government.

By 2018, the Commission shall submit a further report to the European Parliament and to the Council assessing the extent to which the information on liabilities published by the Commission (Eurostat) represents the entirety of the implicit liabilities, including contingent liabilities, outside government.

Article 12

Review

By 1 July 2018 and every five years thereafter, the Commission shall submit a report on the application of this Regulation to the European Parliament and the Council.

The report shall evaluate, inter alia:

(a) the quality of data on national and regional accounts;

(b) the effectiveness of this Regulation and the monitoring process applied to the ESA 2010; and

(c) the progress on contingent liabilities data and on the availability of ESA 2010 data.

Article 13

Entry into force

This Regulation shall enter into force on the twentieth day following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union.

This Regulation shall be binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States.

ANNEX A

CHAPTER 1

GENERAL FEATURES AND BASIC PRINCIPLES

GENERAL FEATURES

1.01The European System of Accounts (hereinafter referred to as 'the ESA 2010' or 'the ESA') is an internationally compatible accounting framework for a systematic and detailed description of a total economy (that is, a region, country or group of countries), its components and its relations with other total economies.

1.02The predecessor of the ESA 2010, the European System of Accounts 1995 (the ESA 95), was published in 1996 (⁵). The ESA 2010 methodology as set out in this Annex has the same structure as the ESA 95 publication for the first thirteen chapters, but then has eleven new chapters elaborating aspects of the system which reflect developments in measuring modern economies, or in the use of the ESA 95 in the European Union (the EU).

1.03The structure of this manual is as follows. Chapter 1 covers the basic features of the system in terms of concepts, and sets out the principles of the ESA and describes the fundamental statistical units and their groupings. It gives an overview of the sequence of accounts, and a brief description of key aggregates and the role of supply and use tables and the input-output framework. Chapter 2 describes the institutional units used in measuring the economy, and how these units are classified into sectors and other groups to allow analysis. Chapter 3 describes all transactions with regard to products (goods and services), as well as non-produced assets, in the system. Chapter 4 describes all the transactions in the economy which distribute and re-distribute income and wealth in the economy. Chapter 5 describes the financial transactions in the economy. Chapter 6 describes the changes that can occur to the value of assets through non-economic events or price changes. Chapter 7 describes balance sheets, and the asset and liability classification scheme. Chapter 8 sets out the sequence of accounts, and the balancing items associated with each account. Chapter 9 describes supply and use tables, and their role in reconciling the measures of income, output and expenditure in the economy. It also describes the input-output tables that can be derived from the supply and use tables. Chapter 10 describes the conceptual basis for the price and volume measures associated with the nominal values found in the accounts. Chapter 11 describes the population and labour market measures which can be used with measures of the national accounts in economic analysis. Chapter 12 gives a brief description of quarterly national accounts, and how they differ in emphasis from the annual accounts.

1.04Chapter 13 describes the purposes, concepts and compilation issues in drawing up a set of regional accounts. Chapter 14 covers the measurement of financial services provided by financial intermediaries and funded through net interest receipts, and reflects years of research and development by Member States in order to have a measure which is robust and harmonised across Member States. Chapter 15 on contracts, leases and licences is necessary to describe an area of increasing importance in the national accounts. Chapters 16 and 17 on insurance, social insurance and pensions describe how these arrangements are handled in the national accounts, as questions of redistribution become of increasing interest as populations age. Chapter 18 covers the rest of the world accounts, which are the national accounts equivalent to the accounts of the balance of payments measuring system. Chapter 19 on European Accounts is also new, covering aspects of the national accounts where European institutional and trading arrangements raise issues which require a harmonised approach. Chapter 20 describes the accounts for the government sector — an area of special interest as issues of fiscal prudence by Member States continue to be critical in the conduct of economic policy in the EU. Chapter 21 describes the links between business accounts and national accounts, an area of growing interest as multinational corporations become responsible for an increasing share in gross domestic product (GDP) for all countries. Chapter 22 describes the relationship of satellite accounts with the main national accounts. Chapters 23 and 24 are for reference purposes; Chapter 23 sets out the classifications used for sectors, activities and products in the ESA 2010, and Chapter 24 sets out the complete sequence of accounts for every sector.

1.05The structure of the ESA 2010 is consistent with the worldwide guidelines on national accounting set out in the System of National Accounts 2008 (2008 SNA), apart from certain differences in presentation and the higher degree of precision of some of the ESA 2010 concepts which are used for specific EU purposes. Those guidelines were produced under the joint responsibility of the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. The ESA 2010 is focused on the circumstances and data needs in the EU. Like the 2008 SNA, the ESA 2010 is harmonised with the concepts and classifications used in many other social and economic statistics (for example, statistics on employment, statistics on manufacturing and statistics on external trade). The ESA 2010 therefore serves as the central framework of reference for the social and economic statistics of the EU and its Member States.

1.06The ESA framework consists of two main sets of tables:

(a) the institutional sector accounts;

(b) the input-output framework, and the accounts by industry.

1.07The sector accounts provide, by institutional sector, a systematic description of the different stages of the economic process: production, generation of income, distribution of income, redistribution of income, use of income and financial and non-financial accumulation. The sector accounts also include balance sheets to describe the stocks of assets, liabilities and net worth at the beginning and the end of the accounting period.

1.08The input-output framework, through the supply and use tables, sets out in more detail the production process (cost structure, income generated and employment) and the flows of goods and services (output, imports, exports, final consumption, intermediate consumption and capital formation by product group). Two important accounting identities are reflected in this framework: the sum of incomes generated in an industry is equal to the value added produced by that industry; and, for any product or grouping of products, supply is equal to demand.

1.09The ESA 2010 encompasses concepts of population and employment. Such concepts are relevant for the sector accounts, the accounts by industry and the supply and use framework.

1.10The ESA 2010 is not restricted to annual national accounting, but applies also to quarterly and shorter or longer period accounts. It also applies to regional accounts.

1.11The ESA 2010 exists alongside the 2008 SNA because of the uses of national accounts measures in the EU. The Member States are responsible for the collection and presentation of their own national accounts to describe the economic situation of their countries. Member States also compile a set of accounts which are submitted to the Commission (Eurostat) as part of a regulatory data transmission programme, for key social, economic and fiscal policy uses in the Union. Those uses include determination of Member State monetary contributions to the EU budget via the 'fourth resource', aid to regions of the EU through the structural funds programme and surveillance of Member States' economic performance in the framework of the excessive deficit procedure and of the Stability and Growth Pact.

1.12In order that levies and benefits are distributed according to measures compiled and presented in a strictly consistent manner, the economic statistics used for those purposes shall be compiled according to the same concepts and rules. The ESA 2010 is a regulation setting forth the rules, conventions, definitions and classifications to be applied in producing the national accounts in Member States which are to be part of the data transmission programme as set out in Annex B to this Regulation.

1.13Given the very large sums of money involved in the contributions and benefits system operated in the EU, it is essential that the measurement system be applied consistently in each Member State. In such circumstances, it is important to adopt a cautious approach to estimates which cannot be observed directly in the market place, avoiding the use of model-based procedures for the estimation of measures in the national accounts.

1.14The ESA 2010 concepts are in several instances more specific and precise than those of the 2008 SNA in order to ensure as much consistency as possible between Member States measures derived from the national accounts. This over-riding requirement for robust consistent estimates has resulted in the identification of a core set of national accounts in the EU. Where the level of consistency of measurement across Member States is insufficient, the latter estimates are generally included in so-called 'non-core-accounts' covering supplementary tables and satellite accounts.

1.15An example of where it has been considered necessary to be cautious in the design of the ESA 2010 lies in the field of pension liabilities. The case for measuring these to assist in economic analyses is a strong one, but the critical requirement in the EU to produce accounts which are consistent across time and space has obliged a cautious approach.

1.16The increasingly global nature of economic activity has increased international trade in all its forms, and increased the challenges to countries of recording their domestic economies in the national accounts. Globalisation is the dynamic and multidimensional process whereby national resources become more internationally mobile, while national economies become increasingly interdependent. The feature of globalisation which potentially causes most measurement problems for national accounts is the increasing share of international transactions undertaken by multinational companies, where the transactions across borders are between parents, subsidiaries and affiliates. However other challenges exist, and a more exhaustive list of data issues is as follows:

(1) transfer pricing between affiliated corporations (valuation of imports and exports);

(2) the increase in toll processing, where goods are traded across international borders with no change in ownership (goods for processing), and merchanting;

(3) international trading via the internet, both for corporations and households;

(4) the trade and use of intellectual property assets across the world;

(5) workers working abroad, and remitting significant amounts to the family in the domestic territory (workers' remittances, as part of personal transfers);

(6) multinational corporations organising their business across national boundaries, to maximise production efficiency and minimise the global tax burden. This can give rise to artificial corporation structures which may not reflect the economic reality;

(7) the use of off-shore financing vehicles (special purpose entities and other forms) to arrange finance for global activities;

(8) re-exports of goods, and in the EU the transport of goods between Member States after entry into the Union (quasi transport);

(9) increase in foreign direct investment relationships, and the need to identify and allocate direct investment flows.

1.17All of these increasingly common aspects of globalisation make the capture and accurate measurement of cross-border flows a growing challenge for national statisticians. Even with a comprehensive and robust collection and measurement system for the entries in the rest of the world sector (and thus also in the international accounts found in the balance of payments), globalisation will increase the need for extra efforts to maintain the quality of national accounts for all economies and groupings of economies.

USES OF THE ESA 2010

1.18The ESA framework can be used to analyse and evaluate:

(a) the structure of a total economy. Examples of types of measurement used are: (1) value added and employment by industry; (2) value added and employment by region; (3) income distributed by sector; (4) imports and exports by product group; (5) final consumption expenditure by functional heading and product group; (6) fixed capital formation and fixed capital stock by industry; (7) the composition of the stocks and flows of financial assets by type of asset and by sector;

(b) specific parts or aspects of an economy. Examples are: (1) banking and finance in the national economy; (2) the role of government and its financial position; (3) the economy of a specific region (in comparison to that of the nation as a whole); (4) household saving and debt levels;

(c) the development of an economy over time. Examples are: (1) the analysis of GDP growth rates; (2) the analysis of inflation; (3) the analysis of seasonal patterns in household expenditure on the basis of quarterly accounts; (4) the analysis of the changing importance of particular types of financial instruments over time, e.g. the increased importance of financial derivatives; (5) the comparison of the industrial structures of the national economy over the long term;

(d) a total economy in relation to other economies. Examples are: (1) the comparison of the roles and size of government in the Member States of the EU; (2) the analysis of the interdependencies between the economies of the EU, taking into account Member States and their regions; (3) the analysis of the composition and destination of the exports of the EU; (4) the comparison of GDP growth rates or disposable income per capita in the EU and other developed economies.

1.19For the EU and its Member States, the figures from the ESA framework play a major role in formulating and monitoring their social and economic policies.

The following examples demonstrate uses of the ESA framework:

(a) monitoring and guiding the euro area macroeconomic and monetary policymaking, and defining criteria of convergence for the economic and monetary union (EMU) in terms of national accounts figures (e.g. GDP growth rates);

(b) defining criteria for the excessive deficit procedure: measures of government deficit and debt;

(c) granting financial support to regions in the EU: the allocation of expenditure funds to regions uses regional accounts statistics;

(d) determining the own resources of the EU budget. The latter depend on national accounts figures in three ways: (1) the total resources for the EU are determined as a percentage of the sum of Member States' gross national incomes (GNI); (2) the third own resource of the EU is the VAT own resource. The contributions by the Member States for this resource are largely determined by national accounts figures, because these figures are used to calculate the average VAT rate; (3) the relative sizes of the contributions by the Member States for the fourth own resource of the EU are based on their gross national income estimates. These estimates are the basis for the majority of Member States' payments.

1.20In order to establish a balance between data needs and data possibilities, the concepts in the ESA 2010 have several important characteristics. The characteristics are that the accounts are:

(a) internationally compatible;

(b) harmonised with other social and economic statistical systems;

(c) consistent;

(d) operational, meaning that they can be measured in practice;

(e) different from most administrative concepts;

(f) well-established and fixed over a long period;

(g) focused on describing the economic process in monetary and readily observable terms;

(h) capable of applying in different situations and for different purposes.

1.21The concepts in the ESA 2010 are internationally compatible because:

(a) the concepts in the ESA 2010 are consistent with those in the worldwide guidelines on national accounting, i.e. the 2008 SNA;

(b) for the Member States, the ESA 2010 is the standard for submitting national accounts data to all international organisations;