Historical national accounts

The most important descriptive tool of the macroeconomy of, say, Denmark is the current compilations of the National Accounts, henceforth abreviated as Statistics Denmarks current National Accounts.

This page covers two different meanings of ”Historical National Accounts”:

• backcast National Accounts figures, which are consistent the figures of the current National Accounts, but covers previous periods, and
• obsolete published figures of the National Accounts, meaning figures which, for different reasons, partly or wholly are not consistent with the current National Accounts from Statistics Denmark.

Why are both interesting?

Backcast National Accounts figures are interesting because, they extend the consistent description of the Danish economy backwards in Time, further than the current National Accounts figures go. These extended figures help us see the business cycles (the aggregate motion of the economy) over the longer term.

Obsolete published figures of the National Accounts are interesting for those who would like to understand how observers were able to view the economy of their own times, e.g. from the 1950’ies and 1960’ies, of the 1940’ies and 1950’ies.

What is the difference?

Very briefly differences are accounted for by three factors: compilation manuals, the division of labour in the organization of the World’s production, and the coverage of available statistics.

From the first modern sets of National Accounts figures emerged in the 1930’ies and 1940’ies much research has been conducted and conceptual refinement has found their way into the international compilation manuals from organizations, like United Nations (UN) and the OECD. These changes of the basic manuals, changes in the organization and distribution of productive activities across national boundaries (e.g. the increasing globalisation of production) has changed details of even fundamental concepts like Gross Domestic Product (GDP; in Danish: bruttonationalproduktet, BNP).

Economic-political data requirements for a more precise description of the Danish economy’s structures and dynamics increased historically the means with which to provide important improvements in the systematic statistical coverage of areas such as business statistics and labour market statistics.

These three factors combined changes the requirements of and the ability to provide a more precise description of the economy. For this reason the published figures of different compilation regimes, of overlapping years, are usually different even for the exact same years.

To gather what is similar, and separate what is different, we har introduced the somewhat technical term ”National Accounts compilation regimes”, here anre elsewhere abreviated ”NA-regimes”, or ”compilation regimes”.

Previously published figures and descriptions from the Danish National Accounts have revealed 19 different NA-regimes, from the first was published in December 1945, until the lastest, the current, which started in 2016.

Introduction to key the concepts Gross Domestic Product (GDP; in Danish: bruttonationalprodukt, BNP), Gross National Income (GNI; in Danish: bruttonationalindkomst, BNI) and Gross Domestic  Product in factor prices (in Danish: bruttofaktorindkomst, BFI) may be found elsewhere on pages concerning the Danish National Accounts.

Published figures of the Danish National Accounts are divided into 19 separate, official compilation regimes:

In addition there is a half-official compilation regime:

and some unofficial compilation regimes:

Five main publications of obsolete sets of National Accounts figures, in addition to access to the figures of their tables: 

Bjerke, Kjeld, og Niels Ussing: Studier over Danmarks nationalprodukt 1870-1950, Statistisk Departement og Københavns Universitets Økonomiske Institut, G.E.C Gads forlag, 1958. Due to unresolved intellectual property rights we are presently unable to provide this as a pdf-document.

Statistisk Departement: Nationalproduktet og Nationalindkomsten 1930-1946, Statistiske Meddelelser 4. række, 129. bind, 5. hæfte, 1948.

Statistisk Departement: Nationalproduktet og Nationalindkomsten 1946-1949, Statistiske Meddelelser 4. række, 140. bind, 2. hæfte, 1951.

Statistisk Departement: Nationalindkomsten 1938 og 1947-54, Statistiske Meddelelser 4. række, 160. bind, 2. hæfte, 1955.

Statistisk Departement: Nationalregnskabsstatistik 1947-60, Statistiske Undersøgelser nr.7, 1962.

Zip-files with table contents as MS-Excel-spreadsheets

• Tabelindhold - Studier over Danmarks nationalprodukt 1870-1950 (zip)
• Tabelindhold - Nationalproduktet og Nationalindkomsten 1930-1946 (zip)
• Tabelindhold - Nationalproduktet og Nationalindkomsten 1946-1949 (zip)
• Tabelindhold - Nationalindkomsten 1938 og 1947-54 (zip)
• Tabelindhold - Nationalregnskabsstatistik 1947-60 (zip)