Double-entry bookkeeping and the balance of payments
the need for a substantial, conceptual reform
Additional information
Authors
Type
Article in conference proceedings
Year
2020
Language
English
Abstract
On the basis of the identity between each country’s global imports and exports, which is one of the fundamental economic principles of the balance of payments, the paper highlights why the leading account of transactions from/to the rest of the world needs to be reformed. As a strategic goal, the balance of payments should finally move beyond its current purely statistical and simple-entry bookkeeping approach in order to improve its macroeconomic relevance. The creation of an economic account of the nation as a whole and the introduction of a consistent way of recording transactions following a truly double entry bookkeeping would also erase statistical discrepancies ex ante and reflect the necessary equality (identity) of credits and debits both for all transactions taken together and for each of them separately.
Keywords
Balance of payments, Double-entry bookkeeping, Nation’s economic account, Reserve assets
Conference proceedings
Bridging measurement challenges and analytical needs of external statistics: evolution or revolution? Proceedings of the IFC Conference on external statistics
Meeting name
FC Conference on external statistics
Meeting place
Lisbon, Portugal
Meeting date
2021
SDG
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
Diffusion
License
CC BY
Visibility
Public
Status open access
Gold
