Economy, economic situation and national accounts In search

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Since the early 2010s, Eurostat has implemented a centralized collection program for symmetrical TES at the European level, which represents significant progress. Previously, it was necessary to obtain this data from each national institute.

However, TESs are not yet widely available. Among the twenty-seven EU Member States, five do not carry out a "product X product" TES at all (the one discussed in this note). And for the twenty-two Member States that carry out a TES by product, the data are available with a significant delay (in June 2024, the latest year available is 2020). Furthermore, only eight countries carry out a TES every year, the others only do so every 5 years (the minimum required by Eurostat) – either because of the workload involved mom database or because the statistical surveys necessary for estimation are not conducted every year. Finally, TESs are only very rarely "backcast" when the national accounts base changes, i.e., recalculated to avoid breaks in time trends.

In practice, the framework of the TES in homogeneous branches is therefore limited to use for one-off comparisons between countries, or "structural" ones. Due to a lack of frequency and long series, it does not allow for historical analyses or commentary on the most recent economic developments. If we wish to compare dynamics from one year to the next, we must unfortunately be content, probably for a long time to come, with using the data in observable branches of the TRE.