‘Sharpening the tools’: A comment on the provisional 1988 Social Accounting Matrix for South Africa

This article comments on the recent contribution by Eckert et al (1992) in this journal. The comments place social accounting in a historical perspective. This is done to illustrate the effectiveness of SAMs in policy analysis, and to explain the increased mathematisation of economics caused by social accounting. Finally, some comments are made on the future development of social accounting in South Africa in order to push the SAM framework to its limit.