The presentation of the accounts was revised to incorporate nearly all of the major suggestions of the Advisory Committee on the Presentation of Balance of Payments Statistics. The Committee was convened by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to address “conceptual problems in interpreting the U.S. balance of payments and exchange rate developments” and “problems of analysis of the data as presented by the Department of Commerce.” These questions had been prompted in large part by major changes in the world economy and in the international monetary system—notably the widespread abandonment of fixed exchange rates in the early 1970s. The Committee felt strongly that the presentation of the accounts should be as analytically neutral as possible and that no single overall balance should be published. The Committee added that a few partial balances should continue to be published because of their analytical usefulness but that several of the partial balances then published should be discontinued. The Committee also felt strongly that the most useful and analytically neutral classification principle for financial account was by type of transactor rather than by type of asset.
Published