Our GDP FIgures are relatively meaningless and most economists understand that it’s just ‘best we can do’ as a global approximate set of weights and measures.
Now, for forty years or so I”ve been complaining about the Accounting profession because between lenders and the government, and standard accounting practices, ‘information is laundered from the money’ as it passes through the organization. And the reason is that its more work to ‘account properly’, and more work to find errors if you do account properly.
So I want a cash, operating, financial(asset changes), ebitda, and interest, taxes, and finally net representation of any business so that I don’t have to deconstruct it myself. And I want to see P&L’s and Balance sheets monthly so that I don’t have to have the memory of an elephant. (in services I want numbers weekly). We’ve (my team) generally works on a six week window so that we react quickly. Some companies can’t put their numbers out within that time. (I built software so that I see everything in real time. Something that’sthe envy of any ceo in any business.)
Now, for the public sector, it’s both a matter of laundering information from money (and laundering money), but worse, we don’t really keep a balance sheet. And if we did we don’t include the CAPITAL of every kind on it. Which would include every kind of human capital, resource capital, infrastructure capital, and every other demonstrated interest.
Now, we should separate strategic industries from non. And production from non. etc, so that we know when we are losing production capacity and shifting it to financial capacity, and creating an economic imbalance.
And just as in business, moving assets around can mask losses, in public sector accounting, not only is debt a problem but BURNING DOWN CAPITAL is an extraordinary problem.
Now, you don’t know this but our organization’s software will eventually do this. But that’s going to take millions more investment to do it.
Why would a government resist it?
That much transparency prevents lying.