Long abstract

Publications & Documents

In October 2001 a Workshop on Quarterly National Accounts was held in Bangkok, Thailand. It was organised jointly by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific and the Asian Development Bank. Participants attended from 14 developing economies in Asia and from three OECD Member countries, Australia, Japan and Korea.

The financial crises that affected many countries in Asia during the late 1990s highlighted the need for more reliable and up to date statistics. Together with its partner organisations in the region, the OECD has launched a programme to share its experience with non-Members in Asia wishing to develop a range of early-warning indicators, including Business Tendency Surveys, Composite Leading Indicators and Quarterly National Accounts. OECD participation in this programme has been made possible by a grant from the Japanese Government.

Quarterly national accounts are widely used by policy-makers in both the public and private sectors to monitor the current economic situation. The purpose of the Workshop was to exchange information on the methods used by Asian economies to estimate quarterly national accounts, to compare them with the methods used by OECD Member countries and to identify best practices in line with international standards. Several economies attending the Workshop do not yet compile quarterly national accounts and for participants from these economies, the Workshop served as an encouragement to start doing so by showing how a useful set of quarterly accounts can be compiled using indicator methods based on partial and incomplete data sources.