Resurrecting the UK Corporate Sector Accounts

This paper develops what is believed to be a novel method of resurrecting UK national accounts corporate sector data before 1987, the date prior to which fully comprehensive sectoral data are not provided by the Office for National Statistics. A distinction is drawn between the sectors comprising private non-financial corporations (PNFC), on the one hand, and financial corporations, which include some state-controlled enterprises, on the other hand. The resurrected PNFC dataset runs in detail from 1960. A much more limited set of reconstructed data is available for financial corporations. The resurrected data include the savings – broadly speaking, the "retained profits" – and the financial balances – the difference between retained profits and capital spending – of both corporate sectors. Economists collaborating with the UK Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence describe an exercise of this kind as "especially difficult". My method of reconstruction relies on archived, out-of-date, too frequently unreliable national accounts datasets, the scrutiny of those data to remove mistakes, and a detailed examination of a subset of an otherwise overwhelming number of national accounts revisions confined to those having a material and enduring impact in the historic period before 1987. This "bottom-up" method of data reconstruction differs from the “top-down” method of resurrecting the accounts of the public, the rest-of-the-world and the “private” sectors, and the separation of the household sector from the aggregate corporate sector, described in a previous paper: Martin (2019). The combination of the two methods, one bottom-up, the other largely top-down, risks the creation of a dustbin into which data inconsistencies are unwittingly poured. A number of robustness tests provides reassurance that the differently derived historic data for sectoral saving make sense. Comparable tests of household and corporate sectors’ financial balance data are not possible, but the hypothesis that different vintages of PNFC financial balance data are isomorphic representations of the same economic variable is not rejected. The combination of the two methods has allowed improvements to be made to the resurrected household sector series that begin in 1946. Subject to the resolution of outstanding problems with official national accounts data, notably for gross fixed capital formation before 1960, and additional scrutiny and comment, it is the intention to make the complete resurrected sectoral dataset publicly available.