ABSTRACT
In the economic hypotheses the accountant and the economist have had perforce to lie down together, and have ended by each discovering that the other is not bad company after all. Economists, engaged in formulating abstract hypotheses about economic relations, have felt more and more the need for clear-cut mathematical formulations leading to statistical tests. But their possibilities in the economic field were barely beginning to be grasped. Econometrics has been defined as the statistical observation of theoretically founded concepts'. It is an accident of history that econometrics is new, whereas the technique of accountancy is long established. When the logic of the two is argued out, it is clear that the econometrician and the accountant are doing the same thing. Social accounting data have been rapidly built up, but are still far from complete. The specialists in this field overlap with those in econometrics, and are still comparatively few.
