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Sweden

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Economic accounts for agriculture (aact)

National Reference Metadata in Euro SDMX Metadata Structure (ESMS)

Compiling agency: Swedish Board of Agriculture

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The Economic Accounts for Agriculture (EAA) provide detailed information on income from agricultural activity.

The methods are laid down in the Regulation (EC) 138/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council.

6 March 2024

A detailed methodology can be found in Annex I of Regulation (EC) 138/2004.

The EAA are satellite accounts of the European System of Accounts (ESA) providing complementary information and concepts adapted to the particular nature of the agricultural industry.

The EAA are shown as a sequence of inter-related accounts. As the EAA are based on the industry concept, the sequence of accounts is limited to the first accounts of the current account:

- the production account and

- the generation-of-income account

whose balancing items are value added and operating surplus, respectively.

Nevertheless, it should be possible to compile other accounts, at least in part, in so far as the relevant flows can be clearly attributed to them. The accounts in question are the following:

- the entrepreneurial income account (one of the current accounts) and

- the capital account (one of the accumulation accounts).

The EAA provide a wide range of indicators on the economic activities in the agricultural sector: these include output, intermediate consumption, gross and net value added, gross fixed capital formation (GFCF), both in current prices and in constant prices, as well as compensation of employees, other taxes and subsidies on production, net operating surplus or net mixed income, property income and net entrepreneurial income in current prices.

Three indicators of the economic performance of agriculture are defined in the EAA:

•Indicator A: Index of the real income of factors in agricultural per annual work unit.           
•Indicator B: Index of real net agricultural entrepreneurial income per unpaid annual work unit.          
•Indicator C: Net entrepreneurial income of agriculture.

The overall unit is the agricultural sector. However, in order to provide more detailed information and to analyse flows generated by the production process and the use of goods and services, it is necessary to select units which emphasise relationships of a technical-economic kind. This means that, as a rule, institutional units must be broken-down into smaller and more homogeneous units with regard to the kind of production (local kind-of-activity units/local KAUs) are intended to meet this requirement (ESA 2010, 2.147).

The local KAU is defined as the part of a KAU which corresponds to a local unit. The institutional unit's information system must be capable of indicating or calculating for each local KAU at least the value of output, intermediate consumption, compensation of employees, the operating surplus and employment and gross fixed capital formation (ESA 2010, 2.148).

The agricultural holding, (the unit currently used for statistical studies of agriculture (censuses, surveys of the structure of agricultural holdings), is the local KAU most appropriate to the agricultural industry (even though certain other units, such as wine or olive oil cooperatives, or units performing contract work, etc., have to be included in it). Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that the variety of agricultural activities that can be performed on agricultural holdings makes them a special type of local KAU. The strict application of the ESA rule to units and their group should in fact result in a division of the agricultural holding into several separate local KAUs in cases where several activities of the NACE Rev. 2 four-digit class are performed on the same holding.

Although the ESA gives pre-eminence to local KAUs, the unit best suited to analyse the production process is the unit of homogeneous production (UHP). This unit is used to analyse inputs and outputs, since it corresponds exactly to a type of activity. Institutional units are thus divided into as many UHPs as there are activities (other than ancillary). By grouping these units of homogeneous production it is possible to break down the economy into 'pure' (homogeneous) branches. A UHP cannot, as a rule, be directly observed. Therefore, the accounts of homogeneous branches cannot be compiled on the basis of groups of UHPs. The ESA describes a method for compiling these accounts.

The use of the local KAU as the basic unit for the agricultural industry entails recording non-agricultural secondary activities where they cannot be distinguished from the main agricultural activity (inseparable non-agricultural secondary activities of local agricultural KAUs) The selection criterion for inseparable non-agricultural secondary activities is rather the type of activity than the nature of the product. For example, agro-tourism services provided by a farm must only be included if they cannot be separated from its agricultural activities.

The reference area is Sweden.

2020

EAA is compiled using many data sources. The accuracy of EAA is therefore dependent of the data sources used. Some data sources have very good accuracy and some gives rough estimates. It is not possible to sum it up into a single measure of the accuracy.

However, the assessment is that the overall accuracy is good. There are factors lowering the accuracy and the assessment is that the main factors are model assumptions errors. 

- Values at current prices: Million SEK

- Values at constant prices: Million SEK

- Agricultural labour input data: Number in 1000 annual work units

EAA data for at specific reference year is disseminated three times. The dissemination of EAA results are set in a release calender for each year. For reference year 2020 the date were set as follows:

- First estimates: 2020-12-03

- Second estimates: 2021-02-04

- Final results: 2021-10-05

The first estimates are published about one month before the end of the reference year.

The second estimates are published about 1 month after the end of the refernce year.

Final data is published about 10 months after the end of the reference year.

There are no differences between national EAA data and data sent to Eurostat.

The statistics is comparable over the years since 1990.