This is going to be the most boring post of the year

In March of this year, the United Nations Statistical Commissions held its annual meeting in New York. On the agenda were exciting topics such as revisions on how to conduct household surveys, revisions to international statistical classifications or plans for the World Statistics Day. For a nerd like me this sounds like party central. And because your enjoyment is not as important as my body of arcane knowledge, I will write today about one set of significant changes that will be implemented by 2030: The Systems of National Accounts.

The System of National Accounts determines international standards for the calculation of GDP and inflation. The 2025 revision is the first one since 2008 and it has some significant changes in it. At the moment I have no idea how big these changes will be to the GDP of different countries, but some of these things sound potentially really big. All I can do right now is list them below. Note that for those of you who think GDP is a number cast in stone, you should definitely read Diane Coyle’s GDP: A brief but affectionate history, which I keep recommending to anyone interested in economics.

Indeed, GDP is a massive exercise in elaborate guesswork that gets revised about once every decade. The last major revision by the US Bureau of Economic analysis in 2023 found a cool $160bn of extra GDP behind the sofa. That’s basically Morocco or Kuwait.

Hence, they are not inconsequential. So, what can we expect to see for the next couple of years as countries around the world move to update their methodologies? Below is a list of the main changes. And if you think all of that makes sense, then always remember that if something is added to the GDP calculation, it means that it currently isn’t measured at all or enters GDP with a value of zero:

• Services provided by the central bank for free or at minimal economic costs (such as regulatory oversight, measures to promote financial stability, services to manage international reserves, etc.) are valued at production costs and included in GDP. More generally, the emphasis on measuring the contribution of a central bank to the economy is increased given the increased importance of central banks since the last revisions 2008.

• Fees charged by asset managers that go beyond actual management fees (such as admin fees, profit sharing agreements as in the case of the famous 2+20 fees, etc.) have to be included as well.

• Crypto assets and their derivatives as well as mining of crypto assets are newly incorporated in GDP.

• Depletion of non-renewable natural resources, such as oil and gas should be included as a cost to the economy and reduces GDP (And yes, so far, digging for oil has been considered to be of no cost but the sale of it increased GDP…).

• Electricity produced in house by businesses through wind, solar or geothermal energy and the production of heat through heat pumps and other means in households will be included in GDP. Similarly, electricity produced behind the meter by households (e.g. rooftop solar) will be include in GDP calculations as if it were produced by a utility company in a power station.