National accounting from the bottom up using large-scale financial transactions data


This event has been cancelled and will be rescheduled for another term

Recently, the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) has been working with the UK payment system operator to acquire anonymised and aggregated data focusing on transactions at the level of SIC-5 industries nationally and SIC-2 regionally. Starting with an aggregated prototype dataset comprising more than >500m financial transactions worth >£7.5tn from 2015-2022, we assess the feasibility of developing statistics consistent with national accounting standards, but based on population-scale naturally occurring data in real time. In particular, we aggregate our dataset to compare it with published Input-Output tables from the ONS, and discuss observed differences in light of specific accounting rules and measurement issues, thus providing a roadmap to tackle key bottlenecks. Next, we discuss the properties of the more disaggregated networks, providing the first picture of the UK national inter-industry network at the 5 digit level, and of the UK regional inter-industry network based on observed data. We conclude with a research agenda for the use of this dataset in applications, such as nowcasting or evaluating the impact of Brexit and Covid-19.