1.6 The history so far...

The development of national accounting and the statistical description of economic activity has gone through the following stages: The very first economic statistics were compiled for purposes of administrative control and jurisdiction, but they lacked coherence in terms of their principles of recording data and used contradictory concepts. In the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s it was considered necessary to look more closely at key economic relationships in the light of broader, national economic concepts. Anglo-Saxon researchers in particular were interested to measure economic phenomena. Drawing on the theories of Keynes, they focused their attention on effective demand, which was also reflected in many national accounts solutions.

The third stage in the development of national accounting was triggered by World War II and the ensuing reconstruction effort as well as problems with excess demand and economic growth. It was also during this stage, in 1953, that the United Nations published its first national accounting guidelines under the heading "A System of National Accounts" (which is commonly abbreviated to SNA53).

In the past few decades the development of accounting has largely been shaped not only by the development of the national economy and its instruments, but also by growing needs among international organisations for comparable economic data and in general the growing pressures of internationalisation. A second version of the SNA was published in 1968 by the UN, and a third version (SNA93) in 1993 by the UN, the OECD, Eurostat, the IMF and the World Bank. The European Union has its own guidelines for the compilation of national accounts that are compatible with the SNA; the first "European System of Accounts" was published in 1979 (ESA79). A more recent version was published in 1995; ESA95 is compatible with SNA93.

In Finland the first national accounts were compiled in the 1920s, when Valter Lindberg published early calculations of national income on the basis of income and capital tax statistics. In the 1930s, Eino H. Laurila published articles on the concepts of national income. The most noteworthy early achievement in this field was the publication in 1943 of Lindberg's study on "Finland's national income in 1926-1938".

Officially, the beginning of national accounting in Finland is dated to 1948, when the then Statistical Office of Finland received an appropriation in the State Budget for "hiring the temporary personnel required to accomplish national income calculations, which are deemed necessary for the management of central government finances". One senior statistician and two statistical assistants were hired. The Statistical Office of Finland was later to become Statistics Finland, which now has a staff of around 40 working on the system of national accounts, roughly half of them on annual national accounts.