Supply and Use Tables

What does a SUT look like? Let’s take the numerical SUT presented in chapter 14 of SNA 2008 where we aggregated the activities into five industries to keep the tables small and easier to inspect: Agri(culture), Man(ufacturing), Serv(ices) 1, Serv(ices) 2 and Serv(ices) 3. Products have been aggregated similarly. SNA also makes the distinction between market output, non-market output and output for own final use. Again, to keep the tables small, we will not follow SNA in this respect.

The example supply table is as follows:

This table is best read from right to left. Total supply (column 4) consists of domestic output, valued in basic prices (“bp”), i.e. prices excluding taxes as charged by enterprises (column 10), and imports (column 12). Imports have to be “Cif-Fob adjusted” to make them comparable to output in basic prices (column 11). Also, direct purchases of residents abroad (“DP.R”) have to be added to imports (see row 7). To make supply comparable to use the valuation needs to change to purchasers’ prices, i.e. prices as charged to customers (“pp”). This is achieved by adding net taxes, i.e. taxes minus subsidies (column 3), and by adding margins, consisting of trade margins and transport margins (column 2), to total supply in basic prices. This gives total supply in purchasers’ prices (column 1).

The example use table is as follows:

Total use in purchasers’ prices is built up from intermediate consumption (column 7) and the final use components exports (column 8), final household consumption (column 9), final government consumption (column 10) and gross capital formation (column 11). Direct purchases of residents abroad (“DP.R”) are added to household consumption, direct purchases of non-residents (“DP.NR”) in the country are subtracted from household consumption and added to exports. Gross value added (row 9) consists of compensation of employees (row 10), net taxes on production (row 11) and operating surplus (row 12). Column 12 gives the GDP total by the income approach, as composed of the value added components.

This SNA example is a good example of a complex NA table with a relative simple structure, but with classifications which can in practice by quite large (e.g. hundreds of products). NA Builder is ideally suited to work with such a structure. This is illustrated in the following separate sections:

  • An example of setting up a SUT in NA Builder can be found here

  • Some of the automation features of NA Builder can be nicely illustrated by this example and can be found here

  • NA Builder contains many data editing features which assist the SUT compiler in balancing the SUT. Some examples can be found here

  • SUT's are typically not compiled in isolation but appear yearly, both in prices of the same year and in prices of the previous year. Information on the features of NA Builder to facilitate such sequential processing can be found here

  • For analytical purposes it is often useful to combine supply and use tables into a single input-output framework. More information on these tables and the special facilities in NA Builder in working with them can be found here