The fundamental aim of US national economic accounting
The fundamental aim of national economic accounting is to provide a coherent and comprehensive picture of the nation’s economy. More specifically, national economic accountants want to answer two questions. First, what is the output of the economy—its size, its composition, and its use? Second, what is the economic process or mechanism by which this output is produced and distrib¬ uted? ”1 The input-output (I-O) accounts are an integral and essential element of the U. S. economic accounts. First, they are the building blocks for other economic accounts. Prominent among these are BEA’s national income and product accounts (NIPAs), which feature the estimates of gross domestic product (GDP). Second, the I-O accounts provide detailed statistics on economic processes and relation¬ships.