Abstract:
«Around the 1930s, many countries began developing a systematic practice of keeping national accounts—comprehensive statistical systems that could provide an empirical foundation for economic planning and policy. Different countries approached this task in markedly different ways. And yet, at the same time that various countries worked independently to develop their own methods of national accounting, there was a parallel effort, during and after the Second World War, to create a common standard for national accounting. This standard was to make it possible to compare figures between countries and to set guidelines for what was considered “best practice” in national accounting.
The development of national accounts is often considered—even by economists interested in the history of their profession—to be an extraordinarily dull topic. National accounts are overwhelmingly considered to be neutral tools for more core activities such as model building, analyzing economic cycles, and designing policy. Constructing the national accounting systems was both a comprehensive and a complicated task—but the problems that arose during the course of this work have mostly been seemingly of a technical or administrative nature, and thus became uninteresting as soon as they were resolved.
However, the Nordic encounter with the Anglo-American approach to national accounting in the 1940s and 1950s demonstrated that there were far more than simply technical and administrative principles at stake. The standard for national accounting that was adopted in the early 1950s, with Nobel Prize winner Richard Stone as the main architect, was criticized harshly by the Nordic, and particularly Norwegian, economists. The disagreement centered not only on what kind of basic information an international standard should require from a national account, but was also one of principle: The Norwegian economists argued that the British-influenced system broke with key conceptual principles that characterized Norwegian and Nordic theoretical thinking and political-economic rhetoric.
In the following, I will first present the development and key characteristics of the Scandinavian approach. I will then highlight some of the differences between this approach and the Anglo-American tradition, and finally discuss why and how this created a heated debate in national accounting forays in the 1950s and 1960s.»
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