NewEconStats: National Accounts via Everyday Financial Transactions: Economic Statistics for the XXI Century

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Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and its components-consumption, investment, foreign trade, and government spending-are fundamental statistics in modern societies. They are the main way that economic performance is evaluated across time and across countries and inform most important fiscal and monetary policies. Reliable, detailed, and timely measures of GDP are therefore of great social importance. Despite this, even in the most advanced economies national statistical agencies face important constraints in producing national economic accounts. The traditional method uses surveys of households and firms, which are time consuming and costly to run and limited in the samples they reach. In the past decade, economists have increasingly speculated that everyday financial transactions recorded in the digital databases of large private banks could help fill the measurement gap.NewEconStats will use the largest privately held financial transaction dataset in the world currently available to researchers to operationalize this idea. It will build on my current collaboration with BBVA, a top-50 global bank by total assets and the second largest bank in Spain. The project will access the universe of BBVA accounts in Spain, both individual and corporate, to build high quality measures for household consumption, investment, foreign trade and, ultimately, GDP. This will be the first attempt to build fully-fledged national accounts from everyday financial transactions and has enormous social potential. The scale of the data will allow the project to go well beyond current surveys and make feasible the measurement of output at a daily frequency across narrow geographic, demographic, and income groups. The main output of the project will be a set of measurement algorithms that will allow for similar constructions in any country where a statistical agency has access to similar data. The project is supported by both the Spanish and UK national statistical offices.