National accounts (income, saving, assets, and liabilities): Data Collection

General information The new statistics expand New Zealand’s quarterly national accounts to include the income measure of GDP, income and outlay account, capital account, and balance sheets. These accounts show the sequential relationship between the production of goods and services, the generation of incomes through production, the subsequent distribution (and redistribution) of incomes among sectors, use of incomes for consumption or saving, and the accumulation of wealth over time. These new accounts largely extend the full annual coverage to a quarterly basis as well. The National accounts (income, saving, assets, and liabilities): March 2021 quarter have been produced from the June 2016 quarter to the March 2021 quarter. The series are actual and seasonally adjusted. These statistics are experimental and open to feedback. They may be subject to significant revisions in the future as we improve methodologies. The new quarterly series are benchmarked to the annual institutional sector accounts and annual balance sheets. In a few cases, we have different values from these benchmarks due to improved data or where we are developing a new method or approach. Sources and methods For a full discussion of the new statistics and a sources and methods description refer to National accounts income savings assets and liabilities sources and methods The new quarterly accounts are compiled by sector as defined by the Stats NZ Standard Classification for Institutional Sectors (SCIS). The sectors have been aggregated for publication into non-financial business enterprises (1), financial business enterprises (2), central government institutions (31), local government institutions (32), non-profit institutions serving households (4), households (5), and rest of the world (6). Balance sheet asset and liabilities are concorded to standard classifications; the Statistical Classification of Non-financial Assets and the Statistical Classification of Financial Assets and Liabilities 2013. Income tax paid There was a reporting change in June 2019 for corporate tax paid that changed the apparent seasonality of these series. For periods September 2019 onwards, the series are not seasonally adjusted, and the actual value is used. Until there are enough periods of data to seasonally adjust the new reported data, no seasonal adjustment is possible. This means the once enough periods are available the series will be revised. Data source There are over 20 data sources which the new statistics draw upon. The key sources are the Business Financial Data (BFD), Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) surveys, Crown Financial Information System (CFIS), and the Balance of Payments (BOP) and International Investment Position (IIP). These sources cover a significant part of the New Zealand economy and are available with a quarterly frequency. These quarterly accounts are released as ‘experimental’. This is due to further work being undertaken to refine methodologies, which are expected to result in revisions to estimates. Although experimental results are expected to be informative, once methodology development is completed the ‘experimental’ caveat will be removed. Even after the ‘experimental’ phase is complete we are likely to periodically bring in new data sources or make methodology improvements in our national accounts work. To retain coherence in our time series of data, such changes may require adjustments to historical values. Therefore, data values with a FINAL status may be revised in future releases. National Accounts Annual national accounts sources and methods has more information on this. en-NZ