Material Product System
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Material Product System (MPS) refers to the system of national accounts used in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, as well as in China until 1993. The MPS has now been replaced by the UNSNA accounts in most countries, although some countries such as Cuba and North Korea continue to use MPS (alongside UNSNA-type accounts).
The main structural differences between MPS and UNSNA are attributable to a different interpretation of newly created value, and of the accumulation of stocks of wealth. Consequently, there are differences in grossing and netting procedures for the main aggregates. In MPS, many services are not regarded as value-adding, and therefore excluded from total net output. As the name suggests, the MPS aims to measure the annual output of material goods, in contrast with services. In MPS the economy is divided up into three sectors: (1) socialist productive enterprises, (2) the non-productive sphere, and (3) households.
The MPS accounts originated in the Soviet Union, around the same time that the first Western attempts were made to create systematic social accounts (i.e. in the 1920s and 1930s). They were influenced by the ideas Karl Marx had about the creation and accumulation of wealth, and about productive and unproductive labour in capitalist society. However, Marx himself never attempted to create any system of social accounts for socialist economies; his own economic categories concerned the capitalist mode of production, and not a socialist economy.
