The “Protestant” View: The Norwegian and Scandinavian Approach to National Accounting in the Postwar Period

Around the 1930s, many countries began developing a systematic practice of keeping national accounts—comprehensive statistical systems that could provide an empirical foundation for economic planning and policy. Different countries approached this task in markedly different ways. And yet, at the same time that various countries worked independently to develop their own methods of national accounting, there was a parallel effort, during and after the Second World War, to create a common standard for national accounting. This standard was to make it possible to compare fi gures between countries and to set guidelines for what was considered “best practice” in national accounting. The development of national accounts is often considered—even by economists interested in the history of their profession—to be an extraordinarily dull topic. National accounts are overwhelmingly considered to be neutral tools for more core activities such as model building, analyzing economic cycles, and designing policy. Constructing the national accounting systems was both a comprehensive and a complicated task— but the problems that arose during the course of this work have mostly been seemingly of a technical or administrative nature, and thus became uninteresting as soon as they were resolved.