Canadian economic accounts quarterly review: National balance sheet accounts and Canada's international investment position

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National balance sheet accounts and Canada's international investment position

The National balance sheet accounts and Canada's international investment position, currently released on an annual basis, will start to be published quarterly in June 2003. This change will mean that a more complete set of accounts will be available each quarter, providing a more timely measure of the net worth of Canadians and allowing a more complete analysis of the asset and debt structures of the sectors of the Canadian economy.

To facilitate the move to quarterly data, the annual data for 2002 that normally would have been published in March 2003 will be released in June 2003. At that time, quarterly time series for both the National Balance Sheet and Canada's international investment position will be released back to 1990.

This first release of quarterly position statistics will be part of a multi-year plan to provide users with more up to date and meaningful data:

In June 2003 quarterly positions for both Canada's international investment position (IIP) and the National balance sheet accounts (NBSA) will be released. These positions with the exception of non-financial assets will be at book value, the same valuation basis as in the past annual releases.

In the second year of the project quarterly positions at market value for financial assets and liabilities will be released for the IIP and the NBSA, along with the book value series. This will offer analysts a choice depending on the type of questions they are investigating.

In June 2003, Canada's international investment position catalogue No 67-202-XIE and No 67-202-XIF and the National balance sheet accounts catalogue No 13-214XDB and No 13-214DDB will be available and will contain quarterly positions. Existing annual position series on CANSIM will continue and a new set of quarterly time series will be created.

The level of detail of the quarterly positions will be the same for the NBSA and the main table of the IIP. Some detailed Foreign Direct investment (FDI) and portfolio series will also be available on a quarterly basis. However, some very detailed country breakdown FDI series along with some portfolio investment and other investment series will not be available on a quarterly basis.

The list of tables that will be available on a quarterly basis, as they will appear in the IIP release in June 2003, will be available soon.

Additional details on the second phase of this multi-year project will be posted will be posted on Statistics Canada's website (http://www.statcan.gc.ca) as they become available.