The specific sub-system of national accounts dedicated to the public sector
deserves careful analysis since through this, the main public policy actions can be
monitored by statisticians. With great care, in the System of National Accounts (SNA)
and the European System of Accounts (ESA) in the EU, public sector and government
accounts are brought into the framework and firmly linked within the core system of
national accounts. This is a required coherence effort as there is a long history of public
sector accounts and, normally, a double accounting with different criteria is carried out
by the public institutions in European countries. The basic frame and definitions will be
introduced in this chapter, underlining the problems but also the necessity of this great
effort at the accounting level.
This challenge represents a frontier for accounting research for the purposes of
monitoring policies for sustainable development.
Keywords: Functional classification, Government finance, Government accounts, Public sector accounting, Sustainable development policies.
