Since 2004 PARADIGMA has continuously worked with Statistics Austria to develop tools to support the production process of the public sector national accounts.

High visibility as well as the political sensitivity of the quarterly released performance numbers of the public sector in the light of the introduction of the common currency, the EURO and the provisions of the Maastricht treaty motivated this investment.

Starting from the raw data set, containing data from ledgers of communities, regional government, national government as well as public institutions, PARADIGMA's  framework supports all subsequent production stages:

  •     Transformation of public accounts to ESA transactions using a rule based engine
  •     Application of distribution methods, imputations and corrections
  •     preparation of tables/national accounts
  •     Publication of the authentic data
  •     Dissemination (EUROSTAT, OECD)

Benefits of the new process:

Using the system in their daily work, the department has seen a significant reduction in the transformation and rule application cycle, mapping the ledger accounts to NSA transactions. As a consequence, more time is available to analyze the data and to compile the accounts in compliance with ESA standards.

The ability to try alternative combinations of methods and to gauge their impact on the results in "quasi-real" time increases the data quality (consistency and coherence). Statistics experts are able to compute and compare different variants of the accounts, depending on the data used and the methodology deployed. The system provides for the persistent storage of these variants , enabling auditing and quality control of the production process as well as of the resulting tables.

The pervasive use of consistent metadata within the department allows the reuse of results and thus makes the department even more productive.

Final quarterly and annual results, the authentic data, are made available in a database which is available to internal users, enabling other departments to access the data without assistance from the national accounts experts.

Publication is supported through automated procedures submitting data to EUROSTAT as well as to Statistics Austria's statistical dissemination system, which is based on SuperWEB.