Microsoft Word - 00_Title_draft.doc

Interim report “Measurement of Government Output and Productivity for the National Accounts”;

information on public investment expenditure in volume;

g) Regulatory activities (simplification and impact of regulation).

A further possible implementation of the extension of the core of the information system would be
achievable through the link with other data bases already available at the international level, which could
be eventually better harmonized with NA statistics. These additional existing datasets (besides the GFS –
managed by the IMF - already mentioned above) are those managed by the OECD, in particular in the
field of:

I. Research & Development

II. Education

III. Health

The possibility of a coherent extension of the NA statistics (expanded according to the lines illustrated so
far) through the link with these thematic databases is subject to a preliminary check of their mutual
consistency. To this aim, some preliminary remarks are made in the following sub-paragraph.

3.3. Developing links with other databases: OECD statistics on education and R&D

So far we have developed an integrated database on the spending functions of the general government
based on the system of National Accounts (SNA). A further stage of the analysis would aim at
integrating such a database with those developed by international organisations (in particular OECD) and
related to specific items of expenditure.

This exercise would turn useful in providing additional and more detailed information on those items the
WGQPF has indicated to be growth-enhancing, as strictly related to the agreed definition of quality of
public expenditure. At the same time, it would allow an extension of the comparison with other countries
than EU Member states with more analytical data collected on a cross-country perspective.

Considering the many methodological problems in relating specific expenditure statistics provided by
alternative sets of data and the additional effort required to countries to pursue this further integration,
this part of the analysis should be implemented in a longer-term perspective.

This section of the paper presents a brief description of the OECD databases on Education and R&D
statistics and a first assessment of the methodological problems encountered in making these datasets
consistent with the whole analytical structure developed in the preceding sections of the paper.