The IARIW Council is pleased to offer an additional benefit to members.

Immediately preceding the 30th IARIW General Conference, there will be a course on national accounts taught by national accounts expert Francois Lequiller, former Director of National Accounts at the OECD and currently Inspecteur General at INSEE. The course is offered free of charge to IARIW members.

The target audience for the course are not experts in national accounts but rather persons with recent economics training at the Master's or PhD level who are regular users of national accounts data but who may lack a deeper understanding of their structure and how they are estimated.

The purpose of the course is to convey the basic concepts of national accounting as well as the structure of national accounts, to discuss the structure of certain key accounts and to introduce some advanced research topics related to national accounting. Attendees will be asked, prior to the workshop, what specific issues they would like the lecturer to cover. The workshop material will be based on the book Understanding National Accounts by François Lequiller and Derek Blades (OECD, Paris, 2006). The book can be accessed without charge in HTML format or downloaded in PDF format.

The course takes place at the St. Bernardin Hotel in Portoroz, Slovenia on Saturday, August 23 and Sunday, August 24. There will be two three hour sessions each day. There is no charge for the course for individual IARIW members and persons whose employer is an IARIW institutional member. There is no limit on the number of persons who can attend, subject to constraints on the size of the room. All persons must register by returning the on-line form below to the IARIW secretariat by June 30, 2008. The cost of the hotel and meals for the nights of August 22 and 23 is not covered in the packages offered for the General Conferences. Session participants must make reservations for the additional nights directly with the hotel.