European sector accounts show detailed economic developments by institutional sector. The accounts are only calculated at current prices (in nominal terms) and do not permit an analysis of volume changes such as economic growth or price developments. Moreover, the growth rates of EU aggregates may be affected by movements in exchange rates and should be viewed with caution.
However, significant ratios such as the household saving rate can be derived as the influence of price developments on the numerator and denominator cancel out. The same holds for EU ratios on which there is hardly any impact of exchange rate fluctuations.
The charts included in this section present an overview of the euro area/EU economy as a whole, as well as specific features of each domestic sector namely: households, non-financial corporations, financial corporations and general government. Because of exchange rate movements, only ratio series are displayed for the European Union.
In the presented charts, EU data have been adjusted for an outlier spotted in the second quarter of 2005 concerning the gross fixed capital formation of non-financial corporations. This adjustment leads to a decrease of non seasonally adjusted data from 339698 to 316708 millions euro for this quarter. The EU investment rate of non-financial corporations has been modified accordingly.
Most of the charts analyse the contributions of components to the annual nominal growth rate of an aggregate. Such annual growth rates are calculated as the percentage change of the item concerned between the reference quarter and the same quarter of the previous year, so that seasonal effects are eliminated (see methodological note in Quarterly data in European accounts). As a consequence, the growth rates for a given quarter in fact refer to the average change over the four previous quarters.
