Resurrecting the UK Sector National Accounts after 1945

Building on the methodology explained in Martin (2009), this paper sets itself the task of backcasting the UK national sectoral accounts before 1987, the date prior to which fully comprehensive data are not provided by the Office for National Statistics. Backcast data cover the private, government and overseas sectors. Innovations compared with the earlier paper include the extension of the dataset to begin in 1946 rather than 1948, and, more importantly, an attempt to backcast financial balances for the household and corporate sectors. This attempt involves the backcasting of pension saving before 1963 and of major components of the household and corporate capital account before 1987. The household and corporate sector data are likely subject to greater measurement error than estimates for more aggregate sector balances, as shown in Martin (2009) and provisionally upheld in this paper by simple tests of stability across different data vintages. Subject to further verification and improvements, now in prospect, in official historic data, the derived postwar sectoral estimates may nevertheless enable more robust testing of a variety of long-run macroeconomic hypotheses.