The U.S. national accounting system lies at the core of the economic statistics and accounting measures that are so central to understanding of the economy. It also provides the origins of fundamental measures of economic performance such as the GDP (gross domestic product), GNI (gross national income), GNP (gross national product), savings rates, current account, etc. Current national accounts date back to the 1930s and their limitations have become increasingly evident as the U.S. and world economies have changed dramatically since then. Key components of the U.S. accounts were developed independently to meet needs of several different statistical agencies and need to be fully integrated. The overall accounts suffer from a number of important gaps. The national accounts were not designed to address policy issues concerning long-term growth, nor do they include adequate measures of wealth (especially that held in private and public pensions), the value of land, and savings. This grant supports a project to develop a new architecture for the U.S. National Accounts. Papers presented at a 2004 conference supply a background for this work and have been collected in the volume, A New Architecture for the U.S. National Accounts by Dale W. Jorgenson, J. Steven Landefield, and William D. Nordhaus, University of Chicago Press, 2006. Some examples of major contributions anticipated from this project include: making possible the creation of a national balance sheet, currently absent from the national system of accounts; filling the gap in current accounts of adequate measures for the value of wealth in the form of real estate; reconciling the large disparities in current estimates of national savings and wealth, thereby making it possible to analyze more effectively the impacts of alternative tax policies; creating improved estimates of economic output by industry and resolving current inconsistencies in such estimates now produced by different federal statistical agencies; and facilitating much more rigorous international comparisons of U.S. economic performance than are now possible. Project Director: Dale Jorgenson, Samuel W. Morris University Professor, Department of Economics.