Producto Interno Bruto y los componentes del gasto en Uruguay, 1955-2016: propuestas de empalmes

In Uruguay, information of the System of National Accounts is available since 1955, but homogeneous time-series are only offered for a shorter period (since 1997). National accounts have been calculated using two approaches: the production and the demand approach. Official estimates are available for several base years: 1961; 1978; 1983; 1988 revision, 1997 and 2005, though each benchmark was constructed from different sources and methodologies. In our research, we accept the official series for 1997 onwards and used other techniques to link the different base series prior to 1997 and back to 1955. In this paper, we focus on the demand side and we pursue two objectives. On the first place, we propose homogeneous annual time-series of GDP, exports, imports, gross capital formation, household final consumption expenditure and consumption of general government between 1955 and 2016, at current and at constant prices. We employ two splicing techniques: retropolation and interpolation. On the second place, we discuss the differences of the spliced series, for each variable, in terms of levels, growth rates and expenditure structure of GDP. Finally, we suggest that interpolation may be a better procedure than retroplation to obtain homogeneous national accounts time-series for this historical period in Uruguay.