Who said this?

While rummaging down the back of the internet, I stumbled across the excerpt below from Wiki's explanation of the 'value added' method of calculating GDP. I've replaced the missing word with "xxx", see if you can guess who or what "xxx" is before reading the Wiki article:

... xxx theory regards the "imputed rental value of owner-occupied housing" which is included in GDP as a fictitious entry; if the housing is owner-occupied, this housing cannot also yield real income from its market-based rental value at the same time.

In the 1993 manual of the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA), the concept of "imputed rental value of owner occupied housing" is explained as follows:

"6.89. Heads of household who own the dwellings which the households occupy are formally treated as owners of unincorporated enterprises that produce housing services consumed by those same households... The same figure is recorded under household final consumption expenditures."

Xxx economists object to this accounting procedure on the ground that the monetary imputation made refers to a flow of income which does not exist, because most home owners do not rent out their homes if they are living in them.

Another important difference concerns the treatment of property rents, land rents and real estate rents. In the xxx interpretation, many of these rents, insofar as they are paid out of the sales of current output of production, constitute part of the new value created and part of the real cost structure of production. They should therefore be included in the valuation of the net product.

This contrasts with the conventional national accounting procedure, where many property rents are excluded from new value-added and net product on the ground that they do not reflect a productive contribution.

I'm with the mainstream view on this. Strictly speaking only building rents should be included in income/expenditure of owner-occupiers, because land rents are merely a transfer payment from non-landowners to landowners (thus have to be subtracted from GDP before being added back), but xxx is/are clearly wrong; imputed rental income is real income, in the same way as the apples you grow in your back garden and eat are real apples, and furthermore land rents do not form part of the cost of goods and services supplied or add to the value; they merely reflect how the income/profit is divided up between the productive business and the landowner.

So who or what is "xxx"? On the face of it, you'd be sorely tempted to say "Home-Owner-ist", but you'd be wrong.

Click and highlight to reveal the answer: Marxist.