Abstract

"Visualizing the National Economy: Mapping and Measuring National Wealth and Income, 1930s-1970s"

Paula Vedoveli, Fundação Getulio Vargas (paula.vedoveli@fgv.br)

The publication of the first edition of System of National Accounts (SNA) in 1953 by the United Nations sought to provide the basis for the international comparison of the performance of diverse national economies and relied on the widespread diffusion and acceptance of macroeconomic concepts such as gross domestic product and national income. Though largely reliant on earlier practices of accounting including double-entry bookkeeping, the adoption of the SNA also required representing the economy as an integrated system that categorized economic actors, activities and industries in predetermined categories, and which privileged registering the flow of goods, services and income at the expense of representing a nation’s stock of wealth. This paper analyzes how national accounting techniques and statistics were represented visually via graphs, diagrams, and maps to produce their corresponding visions of how national economies should be organized, registered and quantified. In this process, they were mobilized as instruments for the intervisibility of economic actors and the capitalist economy to promote convergence towards practices and policies associated with good economic governance and development. The paper also examines how these techniques helped displace measurements of national wealth in the second half of the twentieth century thus giving prominence to GDP and national income as indicators that could be used to assess economic development and growth.