The IARIW is offering a training course immediately preceding the General Conference on the topic of national accounts. Details on the sessions are found below. The sessions are open to individual IARIW members as well as employees of IARIW institutional members at no charge. As space may be limited, persons interested are encouraged to register as soon as possible. The deadline for registration is June 30, 2020.

Registration is now closed.

The training sessions will be held all day August 23 and 24.

Course on National Accounts

The course in based on the second edition (October 2014) of the OECD manual “Understanding National Accounts” by François Lequiller and Derek Blades. The manual is available free on line. The chapters referenced in the time-table are those of the manual.

The course is directed to non-experts. While it covers the theoretical definition of the main national accounts aggregates, it does so in a lively manner based on the concrete experience of the teacher (including as a number-cruncher), and on some exercises. François Lequiller has been the head of the French national accounts and has a wide international experience (OECD, IMF, Eurostat). He will explain the sources from which aggregates are derived, and, last but not least, will discuss their quality and their limitations. A part of the course will cover the themes that have been recently dubbed as “beyond GDP”: well-being and globalisation.

The duration of the course is of 16 hours, in 8 sessions.

Day 1 (August 23, 2020):

8:00-10:30 - Session 1: The essential macroeconomic aggregates: GDP, GNP, the basic accounting identities (Chapter 1)

11:00-12:30 - Session 2: The national accounts machinery, integrated economic accounts and the limitations of national accounts aggregates (Chapters 10 and 11)

13:30-15:30 - Session 3: The volume/price split in spatial and geographical comparisons, and international comparability (Chapters 2 and 3)

16:00-18:30 - Session 4: The production frontier and final uses (Chapters 4 and 5)

Day 2 (August 24, 2020):

8:00-10:30 - Session 5: Household and business accounts (Chapters 6 and 7)

11:00-12:30 - Session 6: Financial accounts (Chapter 8)

13:30-15:30 - Session 7: General government accounts (Chapter 9)

16:00-18:30 - Session 8: GDP, well-being and globalisation (Chapters 15 and 16)

The power points of the course will be circulated to the attendants one week before the course. A hand-held calculator would be useful.