ABSTRACT
Vauban and Boisguilbert introduced the concept of national income and were the first to attempt to measure it. It remained for François Quesnay, founder and leader of the physiocratic school, to express in 1758 the first dynamic accounting representation of a whole economy. Measurements of national income were increasing on the eve of the Revolution. Indicators of the progress of statistical method, they also reflected the general disquiet and the intensity of the dispute about income distribution.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Say defined total income as the sum of all individual monetary incomes, an amount equal to the value of production. After the fall of Napoleon, liberal economic doctrine carried the day and statistical research declined. Statistics were considered likely to give inopportune temptations to interventionists.
After the crisis of 1847 and the revolution of 1848, economists strove to understand crises and to predict them; Clément Juglart (1819–1905) attempted to measure their periodicity. Work on forecasting increased at the beginning of this century. At the same time, the concept of national income was refined, and broad agreement was reached on the need to include services therein. Attempts were also made to understand income distribution.
Between the two World Wars, research on forecasting continued, as much in the United States as in Europe. But France was an exception: in management circles, economic observation was synonymous with intervention. The influence of the ideas of Keynes and the failures of economic policies taken in the absence of relevant data, soon led to the idea of accounting for the whole economy. An accounting framework was worked out during the Occupation. After the Liberation, research started up again within the framework of the Commissariat général au plan. At the Conseil supérieurde la comptabilité, a committee was given the task of establishing a link between national accounting and enterprise accounting. Various organizations and committees worked on improvements in methodology; the overall result was a relatively original French national accounting model.
