It continues to evolve and is maintained by the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and Eurostat.
The aim of SNA is to provide an integrated, complete system of accounts for economic analysis, decision taking and policymaking.
As individual countries use SNA as a guide in constructing their own national accounting systems, it result in higher international comparability.
the difference in presentation is not a major problem, as the system provide sufficient data to be reworked according to the SNA standard.
The results are published in a UN Yearbook, National Accounts Statistics: Main Aggregates and Detailed Tables, which currently (and until the 2008 revision comes into force) follows the 1993 recommendations.
Among the reasons are that: These accounts include various annexes and sub-accounts, and standards are also provided for input-output tables showing the transactions between production sectors.
[6] SNA has been criticised as biased by feminist economists such as Marilyn Waring[7] and Maria Mies[8] because no imputation for the monetary value of unpaid housework, or for unpaid voluntary labor is made in the accounts, even though the accounts do include the "imputed rental value of owner-occupied dwellings" (the market-rents which owner-occupiers would receive if they rented out the housing they occupy).
In most OECD countries, statisticians have in recent years estimated the value of housework using data from time use surveys.
Sometimes an "opportunity cost" method is also used: in this case, statisticians estimate how much women could earn in a paid job if they were not doing unpaid housework.
Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, claimed at the IMF World Bank annual meetings in Tokyo in October 2012 that women could rescue Japan's stagnating economy, if more of them took paid jobs instead of doing unpaid care work.
[12] The oddity of this is, that the finance sector nowadays dominates international transactions, and strongly influences the developmental path of the world economy.
Statisticians have also criticized the validity of international statistical comparisons using national accounts data, on the ground that in the real world, the estimates are rarely compiled in a uniform way – despite appearances to the contrary.
For example, Jochen Hartwig provides evidence to show that "the divergence in growth rates [of real GDP] between the U.S. and the EU since 1997 can be explained almost entirely in terms of changes to deflation methods that have been introduced in the U.S. after 1997, but not – or only to a very limited extent – in Europe".
[13] The "magic" of national accounts is that they provide an instant source of detailed international comparisons, but, critics argue, on closer inspection, the numbers are not really so comparable as they are made out to be.
In that case, one may not need to survey P or its components directly, it is sufficient to get trend data for X, Y, and Z and feed them into a mathematical model which then predicts what the values for P will be at each interval of time.