The UK National Accounts

In 1940, at the suggestion of Austin Robinson, Stone transferred to the Cabinet Office to work with James Meade to produce national accounts to underpin the wartime finances. At one point, his superior moved him from working on the prototype National Accounts to oil statistics. Stone had the opportunity of telling Keynes about this move, who said, ‘I’ll soon stop that’, and subsequently took on Stone as his statistical assistant. Stone comments that ‘this saved the national income [work] and in all respects was a very good arrangement since Keynes showed immense interest in the development of the work’ [167: 70-71].

By the end of 1940, Stone and Meade had prepared estimates for 1938 and the four quarters of 1940. Keynes at the Treasury became interested because earlier in the year he had included estimates of national income for 1938-1939 in his 1940 report on How to Pay for the War. It was during this period that Stone got to know Keynes well, working with him through the rest of the wartime period and he was with him in the USA during the American loan negotiations. The Meade-Stone estimates became the first UK National Accounts and were published alongside the 1941 Budget, with a paper on them in the Economic Journal in 1941 [8]. The Central Statistical Office (CSO) was established in 1940 and Stone continued there to develop the accounts. He soon linked up with statisticians in the USA, who had a longer history of compiling national accounts, and he reconstructed the US data to compare with the UK accounts and definitions that he and Meade had established.