Abstract:
National income is the value of the country's productive activity defined as the Gross
National Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It is considered a very
important concept because its increase, which is economic growth, is not only a measure of
the national increase in wealth, but is also a measure of the increase in the freedom of
choice in the economy. Due to the importance of this concept and the existence of several
methods to measure the Lebanese national aggregates in the absence of updated official
statistics, this paper will examine, compare and evaluate the various available approaches. The Central Statistics Department is the only official organization using an input-output
model while the Council for Development and Reconstruction is the sole provider of a
macroeconomic long term forecast. The Horizon 2000 CDR national accounts are a
function of, mainly, public finance accounts based on highly optimistic and unrealistic
assumptions. The third model is that of Banque Audi, which presented its first
macroeconomic aggregates in the early nineties when, no other source was publishing such
data. Its model is formed of exogenous and endogenous parameters that are computed
according to the flow of income of the different agents in the economy, based on the
interaction between the money market and the real market. On the other hand, due to the lack of reliable and accurate data, the Central Bank of
Lebanon and Banque Audi resorted to barometric indicators to detect the direction of
economic trends. The Central Bank's index of coincident indicators is weighted according
to the degree of correlation. Banque Audi' s sectoral index is constituted of sectoral
indicators weighted according to GDP structure adjusted by some personal opinion.
Finally, all discussed models can not be considered macroeconometric models because
though the macroeconomic approach exists the reliability and availability of data and the
econometric methodology are still rudimentary. Nevertheless, the difficulty of obtaining
data and the degree of its importance in calculating national income can determine the
priorities to be followed in improving the GDP & GNP estimation in Lebanon.
