The integration of economic and social statistics – General issues

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Saunders, Christopher T.¹

Note: [1] Christopher Saunders was a staff member of ECE and Director of the General Economic Analysis Division from 1965 to retirement in 1973. Since then, he has been Professorial Fellow at the University of Sussex, Brighton, in the Sussex European Research Centre (now merged in the Science Policy Research Unit). He was previously director of the National Institute for Economic & Social Research, London, and before that Deputy Director of the British Central Statistical Office. Publications include books and articles on national accounts, international trade (especially East-West European relations), comparative pay distributions as well as contributions to the ECE's economic reports.

Abstract: Important issues arise in translating into practice the accepted need for an improved integration of economic and social statistics. The more general of these issues in integration concern more than one field of social statistics. The growing emergence and use of micro-data creates the need for their integration with macrodata bases. Of particular importance are time use surveys, as their integration into the existing body of socio-economic statistics would offer new and improved uses of these data. Comparisons of data on health, education and housing as presented in national accounts on one hand with data from different sources on the other shed light on a number of ambiguities, discrepancies and gaps. The issues affecting integration in this respect include final consumption and expenditure, the functional classification of expenditure or consumption and total consumption of the population. Solutions to the problems of integration can be found in several ways, including the development of satellite accounts

DOI: 10.3233/SJU-1985-3201

Journal: Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 137-151, 1985