1. World Bank, Washington DC
High Level Forum on the Long Term Development of the SNA “Criteria for setting priorities for the SNA research agenda”
17-18 November 2008
World Bank, Washington DC
Joe Grice
Executive Director, Economic, Labour Market and Social Analysis, Office for National Statistics

2. Prioritisation as the Name of the Game
Not difficult to write down huge numbers of issues
Prioritisation therefore essential
Rational approach to compare costs and benefits
Well developed approach - not least for statistical work programmes
But may need adaption for SNA research purposes

3. User Needs
National accounts not for their own sake but because they are useful
Full regard to user needs thus essential…
… and all the more so given resource constraints
But user needs have number of dimensions

4. Competing Dimensions of User Needs(1)
Historical motivation for National Accounts:
- as a tool for economic management
-as a measure of welfare
Both link to key current agendas
2) Economic demand management versus economic supply and growth
Both are of concern to economic agents and policy makers

5. Competing Dimensions of User Needs(2)
3) Macroeconomic needs versus microanalysis
Some legitimate concerns centre on the main aggregates. Others on the supporting detail
4) Improving quality versus extending applications
Do we put effort into dealing with known weaknesses eg better measurement of quality of services; improving treatment of capital services? Or extensions eg more on informal economy; or environmental outputs?

6. Feasibility and Costs The other side of the scissors
Whatever the potential benefits, how likely are they to be realised:
How difficult is the research topic? Is it likely to be expensive to resolve?
Practicability. If the research topic does look tractable, are NSIs likely to be able to make the results operational eg are any required data sources likely to be widely available? Are NSIs likely to be able to take the research findings on board in a reasonable timeframe?

7. Breadth of Potential Usage
SNA an international standard (obviously!)
So natural to ask could research results be widely taken up across most countries
Good cross check but not necessarily decisive. Many ways to handle development of research conclusions during transitional phase eg satellite accounts; off line analysis

8. Summary (1)
The research agenda should be more than the cumulative sum of issues arising over time
Application of cost benefit analysis looks like a good potential gatekeeper/ prioritisation tool
Previous slides summarise some of the dimensions to be taken into account

9. Summary (2)
Further work would be needed to turn these considerations into a practical decision-making tool
Eg how to weight claims of competing beneficiaries and of expected benefits
But no more difficult to do this than in emerging practice in constructing statistical work programmes. Or, increasingly, the way other research programmes are determined.