the process of economic development. Some provisions have been made for certain elements of social development to be incorporated through satellite accounting. The 1993 recommendations have been endorsed by all of the cooperating agencies, thus greatly expanding its role and use in international statistical comparability. The 1993 SNA also fosters standard definitions and concepts along with a flexible system that can be modified as required by future conditions. Most countries have already announced plans to adopt the 1993 SNA. The 1993 SNA has also been harmonized with other international systems such as the Fifth Edition of the Balance of Payments Manual and Government Financial Statistics.
The SNA framework, as it is, does not very well measure sustainability of a nation's human well-being. It needs to be complemented by additional sets of information, with gender differentiation of data, where applicable, so that an overall trend can be made covering a wide spectrum of issues such as social, political and spiritual aspects of welfare, inequality and poverty, human resource development, and the environment. The statistical measurement of the events that describe societies has, therefore, to go through dramatic changes in the coming decades. The existing relevant sets of data including their timeliness have to be improved upon. As societies become more complex and differentiated, new sets of data are also needed.
Economic indices do not necessarily capture all the social, political, and spiritual aspects of human well-being, which are often extremely important. Much less is known about the social impacts of broader development trends, such as urbanization, market liberalization and impacts of investments. The statistical infrastructure need to be strengthened to gather information for such assessments. This is particularly important, but not an easy task, requiring a different skill mix and a different mode of undertaking statistical activities.
Likewise, national income figures do not reveal information on how income is distributed and the incidence of poverty. Data for household surveys are also required to shed light on the income and expenditure patterns among the poor. Reasonably good progress has been made in the past decades to standardize survey methodologies, and many countries now undertake household surveys, producing fairly professional poverty assessments. Nonetheless, many developing
