The institutional sector accounts presented in this publication provide an alternative to the set of accounts published in the annual National Income and Expenditure report. The institutional accounts provide comprehensive information not only on the economic activities of households, non-financial corporations, financial corporations and the government, but also on the interactions between these sectors and the rest of the world. In addition, the accounts link financial and non-financial statistics, thereby allowing for an integrated analysis of non-financial economic activities (such as gross fixed capital formation) and financial transactions (such as the issuance of debt).

Important economic indicators can be derived from institutional accounts. These include measures such as the household saving rate, the profit share of corporations and the investment rates of the households and corporate sectors.

Consistency with other CSO statistics
The institutional sector accounts draw on a wide range of sources, including many that are used in the compilation of other sets of CSO statistics. For this publication, the main relationships to other published CSO series are as follows:

• The non-financial accounts are based on, and are largely consistent with, the annual reports on National Income and Expenditure (NIE) and Balance of Payments (BoP). However, there are some methodological differences between the data contained in the NIE and BoP reports and those published in the present report. The sector accounts comply with the revised European System of Accounts (ESA2010) methodology in order to ensure greater international comparability.
• The financial transactions account is consistent with the balance on the financial account in the Balance of Payments.

Contents of the publication
The commentary part of the report refers to a number of key economic indicators for 2015 and earlier years. The summary table contains information on key variables for the 2011 to 2015 period while Table 1 provides detailed current and capital non-financial accounts for 2015 only. Non-consolidated financial transaction accounts for 2011 to 2015 are set out in Table 2 while Table 3 contains non-consolidated financial balance sheet data for the same period. Table 4 shows consolidated financial transactions and Table 5 contains consolidated financial balance sheet data. The report also includes four appendices containing background notes on concepts and definitions. Data for earlier years is available on Statbank.

Data Tables
The data tables contained in the present report as well as for earlier years can be downloaded from Statbank on the CSO Website at the following links:

Further Information