Toward Improving Quarterly National Accounts (QNA) in Japan: Lessons from Major Advanced Economies

As the COVID-19 has had unprecedented impact on the worldwide economy, there is a growing need for the statistical data to capture the economic impact caused by significant shocks and the effectiveness of counteracting policies in a timelier manner. A System of National Accounts (SNA), compared to other official statistics or big data, has a strength in providing more systematically consistent and comprehensive data including macroeconomic aggregates such as gross domestic products (GDP) and net lending or net borrowing of institutional sectors like households and cor-porations. To further exploit such advantage, the efforts for compiling and publishing broader in-dicators in SNA on quarterly basis is underway internationally. This article aims at deriving some lessons for improving Japanese quarterly national accounts, surveying both (i) the current status compiling quarterly GDP from three approaches (expenditure and income) and the efforts to im-prove their accuracies, and (ii) the status quo of compiling quarterly sectoral accounts and their practical implication, in four major advanced economies, i.e. Germany, France, UK and USA. While there is no such thing as the single best practice in compiling quarterly preliminary GDP, Japan which relies on expenditure approach should move forward to ameliorate its compilation by in-troducing more granular estimation approach in terms of the supply side commodity classifications, thereby improving the consistency with annual estimates. Further promoting the development of other aspects of GDP is also an issue in order to pursue for further accuracy by enabling checks and balances among multiple approaches. As for quarterly sectoral accounts which Japan is left behind compared to its peers, a priority would be developing a series of accounts of non-financial corpo-ration, the sector that no information is compiled at hand, along with the research project to create quarterly income side GDP.