Measuring the Services of Commercial Banks in the National Income and Products Accounts Changes in Concepts and Methods in the 2013 Comprehensive Revision

摘要

AS PART OF the 2013 comprehensive revision of the national income and product accounts (NIPAs) to be released in July, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) will change its methods for measuring implicitly priced services produced by commercial banks. National economic account statisticians have long recognized that banks are compensated for some services by a portion of the interest that they charge on loans or by a reduction in the interest rates that they pay to depositors - rather than by charging explicit fees. BEA refers to these services as "financial services furnished without payment" or as "implicitly priced services." For example, banks may provide some services - such as processing of checks, disbursing or transferring funds when and where needed, protecting deposited funds, and investment services - without charging explicit fees. To account for such services, the NIPAs include an imputation of the value of these services because they are omitted by the standard measure of output based on revenue from fees or prices, which is used for most industries. The System of National Accounts (SNA), which provides widely followed international guidelines for national accounts, contains recommendations on measuring implicitly priced services of financial intermediaries, including banks, and terms these services "financial intermediation services indirectly measured," or FISIM (SNA 2008, paragraph 6.163, 115).