Abstract
The government influences the national economy through a variety of its transactions: purchases and payments for goods and services, receipts from taxes and sales, transfer payments, and lending and borrowing transactions. To provide data on government activities for the purpose of economic analysis, these transactions are compiled and recorded as government finance statistics. While such statistics necessarily reflect the institutions and practices of the individual countries, a common system of definitions and classifications helps users of these statistics to identify more clearly the impacts of government operations on the national economy and also permits comparisons between countries. Toward this end, the International Monetary Fund has published annually since 1977 the Government Finance Statistics Yearbook, presenting standardized data on the operations of member governments.1 The definitions and standards followed in the compilation of the data are based primarily on A Manual on Government Finance Statistics,2 which has been discussed in draft form with government officials and which is to be published in revised form by the International Monetary Fund.
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