Financial Accounts and Balance Sheets

Data on sector financial accounts and balances sheets back to 1920 were collated by the ONS and Bank of England in 2016 following the suggestions of a paper by Bjork and Offer and are available on the ONS website. The article and datasets are below:

• Historical estimates of financial accounts and balance sheets article - Thomas and Nolan (2016)
• Historical estimates of financial accounts and balance sheets (ONS)

Subsequent work by Alaa Al-Hamad and David Knight at ONS developed historical balance sheet estimates for the Household (HH) and NPISH sector in a series of articles:

• Overview article
• Article on experimental historical data for the HH and NPISH financial categories AF.2 currency and deposits
• Data for HH and NPISH currency and deposits AF.2
• Article on experimental historical data for HH and NPISH financial categories AF.3 financial assets and liabilities
• Instrument map for AF.3 HH and NPISH debt securities and Dataset for AF.3 HH and NPISH debt securities
• Article on experimental historical data for HH and NPISH financial categories AF.4 and AF.5 assets and liabilities
• Instrument map and data for AF.4 and AF.5
• Article on experimental historical data for HH and NPISH financial categories AF.6, AF.7 and AF.8 assets and liabilities
• Instrument map and data for HH and NPISH AF.6, AF.7 and AF.8

Financial accounts at the industry level were compiled by Goudie and Meeks for the period 1948-1982

• Aggregated Financial Accounts for Individual British Industries - 1948-82 - A W Goudie & G Meeks - First Edition

Financial Statistics explanatory handbooks
The Notes and Definitions series and later Explanatory Handbooks for the CSO/ONS Financial Statistics publication are available for various years listed below

1964 1966 1969 1970 1972 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1996 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Historical datasets on the flow of funds and balance sheets
Various pieces of work have been undertaken recently to try and reconstruct the financial accounts and balance sheets of key sectors of the UK economy.  The historical data are summarised in the paper

• Historical estimates of financial accounts and balance sheets (Thomas and Nolan)

Some of the important historical publications are provided below

• The Financial Interdependence of the Economy 1957-1966, Alan Roe
• Bank of England: An Introduction to Flow of Funds Accounting 1952-1970 (49MB)
• Bank of England: United Kingdom Flow of Funds Accounts 1963-1976 (61MB)
• ET - 325 - National and Sector Balance Sheets for the UK - CW Pettigrew - Nov 1980

An instrument map that shows how the instrument classification used the in historical data sources relate to current ESA10 classifications can be found here:

• Instrument map between older data classifications and ESA10

 

The following titles are available to select in the dropdown menus of this section.

• Financial Statistics
• UK National Accounts (Blue Books)

Please select a publication title and year from the boxes below to narrow down the list. Alternatively type in a general search term. The available excel and pdf files are shown in the table. If the publication you are looking for is not in this section please see the complete list of downloadable publications. 

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