Simultaneously balancing supply–use tables at current and constant prices: a new procedure

According to the 1993 System of National Accounts, the annual Supply–Use Tables (SUTs) need to be compiled at both current and constant prices by the National Institutes of Statistics. The most appropriate way to obtain consistent SUTs at both current and constant prices is to balance them simultaneously but, in this case, the main complexity is the nonlinearity that inevitably occurs. This paper proposes a new method to balance extremely large sets of National Accounts simultaneously at current and constant prices. The distinctive features of the proposed balancing method are its flexibility, which is very high compared with the other methods in the literature, and its capability to allow the control of the consistency of the system of deflators that are used. This new balancing method has been applied to balance the Italian 2006 SUTs simultaneously at current and constant prices, and it has yielded very good outcomes.