Back to top
National reference metadata

Iceland

Reference metadata describe statistical concepts and methodologies used for the collection and generation of data. They provide information on data quality and, since they are strongly content-oriented, assist users in interpreting the data. Reference metadata, unlike structural metadata, can be decoupled from the data.

For more information, please consult our metadata website section.

Close

Economic accounts for agriculture (aact)

National Reference Metadata in Euro SDMX Metadata Structure (ESMS)

Compiling agency: Statistics Iceland

Need help? Contact the Eurostat user support


Short metadata
Full metadata

The Economic Accounts for Agriculture (EAA) provide detailed information on income from agricultural activity.

The methods are laid down in the Regulation (EC) 138/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council.

15 April 2024

A detailed methodology can be found in Annex I of Regulation (EC) 138/2004.

The EAA are satellite accounts of the European System of Accounts (ESA) providing complementary information and concepts adapted to the particular nature of the agricultural industry.

The EAA are shown as a sequence of inter-related accounts. As the EAA are based on the industry concept, the sequence of accounts is limited to the first accounts of the current account:

- the production account and

- the generation-of-income account

whose balancing items are value added and operating surplus, respectively.

Nevertheless, it should be possible to compile other accounts, at least in part, in so far as the relevant flows can be clearly attributed to them. The accounts in question are the following:

- the entrepreneurial income account (one of the current accounts) and

- the capital account (one of the accumulation accounts).

The EAA provide a wide range of indicators on the economic activities in the agricultural sector: these include output, intermediate consumption, gross and net value added, gross fixed capital formation (GFCF), both in current prices and in constant prices, as well as compensation of employees, other taxes and subsidies on production, net operating surplus or net mixed income, property income and net entrepreneurial income in current prices.

Three indicators of the economic performance of agriculture are defined in the EAA:

•Indicator A: Index of the real income of factors in agricultural per annual work unit.           
•Indicator B: Index of real net agricultural entrepreneurial income per unpaid annual work unit.          
•Indicator C: Net entrepreneurial income of agriculture.

 

The overall unit is the agricultural sector. However, in order to provide more detailed information and to analyse flows generated by the production process and the use of goods and services, it is necessary to select units which emphasise relationships of a technical-economic kind. This means that, as a rule, institutional units must be broken-down into smaller and more homogeneous units with regard to the kind of production (local kind-of-activity units/local KAUs) are intended to meet this requirement (ESA 2010, 2.147).

The local KAU is defined as the part of a KAU which corresponds to a local unit. The institutional unit's information system must be capable of indicating or calculating for each local KAU at least the value of output, intermediate consumption, compensation of employees, the operating surplus and employment and gross fixed capital formation (ESA 2010, 2.148).

The agricultural holding, (the unit currently used for statistical studies of agriculture (censuses, surveys of the structure of agricultural holdings), is the local KAU most appropriate to the agricultural industry (even though certain other units, such as wine or olive oil cooperatives, or units performing contract work, etc., have to be included in it). Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that the variety of agricultural activities that can be performed on agricultural holdings makes them a special type of local KAU. The strict application of the ESA rule to units and their group should in fact result in a division of the agricultural holding into several separate local KAUs in cases where several activities of the NACE Rev. 2 four-digit class are performed on the same holding.

In order to analyse flows generated by the production process and the use of goods and services, it is necessary to select units which emphasise relationships of a technico-economic kind. This requirement means that as a rule institutional units must be partitioned into smaller and more homogeneous units with regard to the kind of production. Local kind-of-activity units (local KAUs) are intended to meet this requirement as a first but practically-oriented operational approach

Although the ESA gives pre-eminence to local KAUs, the unit best suited to analyse the production process is the unit of homogeneous production (UHP). This unit is used to analyse inputs and outputs, since it corresponds exactly to a type of activity. Institutional units are thus divided into as many UHPs as there are activities (other than ancillary). By grouping these units of homogeneous production it is possible to break down the economy into 'pure' (homogeneous) branches. A UHP cannot, as a rule, be directly observed. Therefore, the accounts of homogeneous branches cannot be compiled on the basis of groups of UHPs. The ESA describes a method for compiling these accounts.

The use of the local KAU as the basic unit for the agricultural industry entails recording non-agricultural secondary activities where they cannot be distinguished from the main agricultural activity (inseparable non-agricultural secondary activities of local agricultural KAUs) The selection criterion for inseparable non-agricultural secondary activities is rather the type of activity than the nature of the product. For example, agro-tourism services provided by a farm must only be included if they cannot be separated from its agricultural activities.

The agricultural holding, which is the unit currently used for statistical studies of agriculture (censuses, surveys of the structure of agricultural holdings), is the local KAU most appropriate to the agricultural industry.In addition to agricultural holdings, the agricultural industry comprises units made up of groups of producers (e.g. cooperatives) which produce wine and olive oil and specialised units which provide machines, material and labour for the performance of contract work.

The entire territory of the country.

Calendar year.

As the data comes from many sources, it is very likely that there will be statistical errors.

Data for animals and animal products are available on a monthly basis, so for these parts the predicted values are very close to the final result.

However, data for cereal are only available annually. Data for some types of vegetables is available on a monthly basis, while for others quarterly, so it is necessary to use indices for forecasting. Therefore, it is not unlikely that there is some difference between the prediction and the final result. The magnitude of the difference has not been assessed.

Data used to estimate total intermediate consumption are mostly available annually and in some instances not very well determined. So indices are needed for forecasting There is likely a high probability of error.

Accounts data: National currency (ISK), values in milliions ISK

Agricultural labour input data: number in 1000 AWU

Data for the years up to and including 2020 were stored in excel files and the data processing was done in excel too. Work is now underway to transfer data and data processing to R and also to build up data schemas in SQL.

Yearly

Results are usually published a few days after they have been submitted to Eurostat and accepted. Due to employees changes, this was delayed for the 2020 data.

To be assessed by Eurostat

The data is comparable for the whole time series 2007-2020.