MoneySupply: Those innovative Scandinavians

A warm welcome to our colleagues from the FT’s Money Supply blog, who are now sharing their thoughts on FT Alphaville. First up, Chris Giles, the FT’s economics editor…
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As far as “just fancy that stories” go, huge revisions to the national accounts of all EU countries have to be completed by the end of this year.

The US, Canada and Australia have already implemented changes to the way they measure GDP to conform to new international standards (the UN Systems of National Accounts 2008) and EU nations are in the process of implementing the European System of Accounts 2010, which is an EU-wide rulebook to implement SNA08. There are many changes, but the big ones that raise the level of GDP in most countries is to count research and development, as well as weapons systems, as final output (which contributes to GDP) rather than an intermediate part of the production process (which does not count).