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Statistical processing

Contact info

Government finance statistics, Economic statistics
Martin Rune Rasmussen
+45 3917 3529

mra@dst.dk

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General Government Finances

The data is collected continuously in the months before the publication from the public account systems and other supplementary sources. It is then compiled according to national accounts principles, where it may be necessary to contact the specific source to clarify certain characteristics of the entries. It may be necessary to make imputations in cases where the data isn’t available at the time of publication. When a full dataset is compiled for all subsectors balancing is carried out to secure internal consistency.

Source data

Final accounts of central government, municipalities, counties and social security funds. Accounts data for public quasi institutions are still not available in March, why unit data for year t-2the data are used.

Frequency of data collection

Data is collected annually. Supplementary information from the tax authorities is collected a couple of weeks before publication.

Data collection

Data is received electronically from the central government, the municipalities and the regions' financial management systems.

Data validation

The primary data is validated at arrival. The results of the classification process are validated on micro and macro level. On the micro level a lot of automatic processes is executed to secure internal consistency and time consistency. On the macro level the time series is validated and checked for plausibility. Furthermore the results of the compilation are checked by Eurostat.

Data compilation

When the data is collected and loaded into the database the classification according to ESA2010 starts. This means that expenditure and revenue is classified into categories like e.g. salary, investments, income transfers and interest. The classification is carried out in three steps. In the first step the actual data is merged with datasets for previous years and all classifications on identical account numbers is copied to the new dataset. in the next step new entries on accounts which have a straight forward ESA2010 interpretation classified automatically. The remaining entries are classified manually. Furthermore all entries are classified by COFOG and branch. The COFOG classification is carried out according to the international COFOG manual (Classification of the Functions of Government). This classification classifies into categories like e.g. defense, health and education.

Primary data is classified on the most detailed level to obtain a nearly perfect link between all entries in the primary accounts and the government finance statistics.

When the classification process is finished the compilation starts. The compilation covers various calculations, imputations and time adjustments. This compilation is necessary for the conversion from primary accounts into national accounts. The calculation of use of fixed capital is an example of a calculation which is carried out for the construction of the government final consumption expenditure. Imputations are made for civil servants salaries to reflect the obtained right to pensions in the future. Time adjustments are heavily used in relation to tax revenue due to the fact that according to ESA2010 the tax revenue should be on an accrual basis.

As a final step all transactions between subsectors are balanced and consolidated.

Adjustment

There is no correction of data beyond what has already been described under data validation and data treatment except the balancing of transfers between subsectors before consolidation.