A person working on a calculator on a table filled with reports.

In March 2025, the UN Statistical Commission endorsed the 2025 System of National  Accounts (2025 SNA) and the 7th edition of the Balance of Payments Manual (BPM7) as the new global standards for compiling national accounts and balance of payments statistics. 

Eurostat and the national statistical authorities in the European statistical system (ESS) crucially contributed to the achievement of these milestones. The European Commission, through Eurostat, is one of the 5 co-owners of the SNA, together with the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. Eurostat is also a member of the Balance of Payments Committee that steered the process to update the BPM. 

The SNA is the international statistical standard for measuring countries’ economic activities including production, income, consumption, capital investment and financial activities, as well as national wealth. 

The BPM provides a detailed and standardized framework for compiling and presenting different economic transactions of residents from one country with the rest of the world over a specified period. 

The 2025 SNA and BPM7 are fully aligned, ensuring consistency in economic reporting worldwide. As international standards, the SNA and BPM allow countries to compile macroeconomic statistics according to best practices and in a consistent way, providing users with relevant, consistent, comprehensive and comparable data across countries.

A key feature of the 2025 SNA and BPM7 is the expanded focus on issues related to well-being and sustainability, digitalisation and globalisation.  

The SNA is the reference for the European System of Accounts (ESA), while the BPM is directly used in the EU context. They provide important indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP), gross national income (GNI) and government deficit which are used in the context of the European Semester, to define EU members’ contributions to the EU budget and the allocation of the EU structural funds. 

In partnership with the national statistical authorities in the ESS, Eurostat is working to revise the ESA 2010 and balance of payments standards in the EU in line with the new global standards.