Flow of funds

the long version

Flow of funds accounts have been available for the UK for about twenty years, but they are still less widely used than might be expected. Several reasons can be found for this: many would-be users seem to have difficulty in perceiving any promising entry point at which to begin using the accounts; even practiced users can have problems with such an apparently straightforward matter as the signs of entries in the matrix table; and manipulation of the entries is difficult because of the constraints on the row and colums sums.