Updating the 2010 Belgian interregional supply and use table - Towards a version compatible with ESA 2010 [ Working Paper 10-19 - 25/10/2019]

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Bart Van den Cruyce (A)
 
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Working Papers

The Working Paper presents a study or analysis conducted by the Federal Planning Bureau on its own initiative.

This paper describes the method used to update the Belgian Interregional Supply and Use table (ISUT) of 2010 and shows the results in aggregated form. The Belgian ISUT first consists of three regional production tables, one per region. Their rows correspond to products, their columns to industries. The second part of the ISUT is the interregional use table. The columns in this table show the intermediate use by region and industry of destination as well as the final use by region of destination. In its rows it has products and their origin is shown: that is the region of production for the domestic part and imports.

The update transforms the old 2010 ISUT, that corresponds to the national SUT for 2010 computed in 2013 according to ESA95/ SNA93 rules, in a new version that corresponds to the national SUT for 2010 computed in 2015 according to ESA2010/ SNA2008. Both ISUTs are in line with the regional account totals for production, intermediate demand, final demand and value added that correspond to the mentioned national SUT tables.

The ISUT chosen as a starting point for the update, and thus also the new one, is expressed in basic prices. That means that trade margins and product-related taxes (e.g. excise taxes) minus subsidies have been removed from the products they are levied upon and transferred to either a trade service or a tax/subsidy row. This choice made it possible to fully respect the new national SUT in basic prices, and not just (as was the case in the old ISUT) the national SUT in purchasers’ prices.

The update of the ISUT in basic prices was a combination of specific and automatic adjustments. The specific adjustments accommodated partly for some important changes in the ESA rules as well as in the Belgian national accounts. The changes in the ESA rules included a different treatment of R&D and of goods sent abroad for processing. The changes in the Belgian national accounts included a revision of the NACE attribution and specific improvements at the product or industry level.

Still, both in terms of number of cells as in terms of euros, most differences between the original and new SUT were resolved automatically. The automatic adjustment process for the three regional supply tables was a RAS procedure, using the elements of the national make table as product totals by industry and the production from regional accounts as industry totals by region. The automatic adjustment process for the interregional use table in basic prices consisted of two series of RAS algorithms, where the first was designed to determine the region of destination of domestic production and imports and the second to determine the region of origin of domestic production.

Both the use table of domestic production and the use table of imports have been updated. The resulting use tables of imports sum to the new national use table of imports. Yet, like the ESA 95 version of the interregional SUT for 2010, the industry totals of the use table of imports do not equal the import totals by industry in the regional accounts. This should not be so because the latter include all imports of goods by a region, including those that are resold to be used in one of the other regions. In contrast to this, a use table of imports only puts goods in the region and industry that uses them.

These tables can be obtained from the FPB for specific research projects, by sending a request to io@plan.be.