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

国内生产总值(GDP)及其组成部分--消费、投资、对外贸易和政府支出--是现代社会的基本统计数据。它们是跨时间和跨国家评估经济表现的主要方式，并为最重要的财政和货币政策提供信息。因此，可靠、详细和及时的GDP测量具有重要的社会意义。尽管如此，即使在最发达的经济体，国家统计机构在编制国民经济账户方面也面临着重要的限制。传统方法使用对家庭和企业的调查，这些调查既耗时又昂贵，而且样本有限。在过去的十年里，经济学家们越来越多地猜测，大型私人银行数字数据库中记录的日常金融交易可能有助于填补这一衡量差距。NewEconomStats将使用目前研究人员可以获得的世界上最大的私人持有的金融交易数据集来操作这一想法。它将建立在我目前与西班牙对外银行的合作基础上，西班牙对外银行是一家总资产排名前50的全球银行，也是西班牙第二大银行。该项目将访问西班牙的西班牙对外银行账户，包括个人和企业，以建立家庭消费、投资、对外贸易以及最终国内生产总值的高质量指标。这将是从日常金融交易中建立完整的国民账户的首次尝试，具有巨大的社会潜力。数据的规模将使该项目远远超越目前的调查，并使在狭窄的地理、人口和收入群体中每天频繁地测量产出成为可能。该项目的主要成果将是一套测量算法，这将使统计机构能够获得类似数据的任何国家都能进行类似的建设。该项目得到了西班牙和英国国家统计局的支持。

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.