A guide for constructing and using composite indicators for policy makers, academics, the media and other interested parties. In particular, this handbook is concerned with indicators which compare and rank country performance.
This Oxford Handbook provides a critical assessment of the history, patterns, and strategies of economic transformation. It deals with major themes including policy issues, illuminating country experiences, and important debates on the respective roles of the market and the state.
The COVID-19 pandemic struck the global economy after a decade that featured a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth. Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the effects of COVID-19 on productivity, and discusses a wide range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth. The book also provides a far-reaching data set of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies, and it introduces a new sectoral database of productivity. The World Bank has created an extraordinary book on productivity, covering a large group of countries and using a wide variety of data sources. There is an emphasis on emerging and developing economies, whereas the prior literature has concentrated on developed economies. The book seeks to understand growth patterns and quantify the role of (among other things) the reallocation of factors, technological change, and the impact of natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is must-reading for specialists in emerging economies but also provides deep insights for anyone interested in economic growth and productivity. Martin Neil Baily Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution Former Chair, U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers This is an important book at a critical time. As the book notes, global productivity growth had already been slowing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and collapses with the pandemic. If we want an effective recovery, we have to understand what was driving these long-run trends. The book presents a novel global approach to examining the levels, growth rates, and drivers of productivity growth. For anyone wanting to understand or influence productivity growth, this is an essential read. Nicholas Bloom William D. Eberle Professor of Economics, Stanford University The COVID-19 pandemic hit a global economy that was already struggling with an adverse pre-existing condition—slow productivity growth. This extraordinarily valuable and timely book brings considerable new evidence that shows the broad-based, long-standing nature of the slowdown. It is comprehensive, with an exceptional focus on emerging market and developing economies. Importantly, it shows how severe disasters (of which COVID-19 is just the latest) typically harm productivity. There are no silver bullets, but the book suggests sensible strategies to improve growth prospects. John Fernald Schroders Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness and Reform and Professor of Economics, INSEAD
While international trade in goods and services has long been expanding, the speed and scope of recent changes have given rise to the term ¿globalization.¿ Among the most pressing policy questions in the United States and other advanced economies are those concerning the impact of globalization: Has globalization fostered productivity growth and well-being in advanced economies? Or have the forces of globalization weakened key national industries, resulted in widespread worker dislocation and wage stagnation, and worsened inequality? Understanding the impacts of globalization is critical to fashioning appropriate policies in a rapidly changing world. But understanding its impacts requires good data, and national statistical systems were not designed to measure many of the transactions occurring in today¿s global economy. The chapters in this volume and its companion, Measuring Globalization: Biases to Price, Output, and Productivity Statistics from Trade, identify biases and gaps in national statistics, examine the magnitude of the problems they pose, and propose solutions to address significant biases and fill key data gaps. The chapters originally were presented as papers at a research conference in 2013 funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and their authors include researchers from academic institutions and statistics agencies in the United States and other countries.
This paper focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical. An estimate of the relationship between trade and income in the past four decades reveals that the long-term trade elasticity rose sharply in the 1990s, but declined significantly in the 2000s even before the global financial crisis. These results suggest that trade is growing slowly not only because of slow growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but also because of a structural change in the trade-GDP relationship in recent years. The available evidence suggests that the explanation may lie in the slowing pace of international vertical specialization rather than increasing protection or the changing composition of trade and GDP.
Presents the proceedings of two workshops on productivity measurement and analysis, which brought together representatives of statistical offices, central banks and other officials involved with the analysis and measurement of productivity at aggregate and industry levels.
This study provides a comprehensive overview of Korea’s macroeconomic growth and structural change since World War II, and traces some of the roots of development to the colonial period. The authors explore in detail colonial development, changing national income patterns, relative price shifts, sources of aggregate growth, and sources of sectoral structural change, comparing them with other countries.
As the accelerated technological advances of the past two decades continue to reshape the United States' economy, intangible assets and high-technology investments are taking larger roles. These developments have raised a number of concerns, such as: how do we measure intangible assets? Are we accurately appraising newer, high-technology capital? The answers to these questions have broad implications for the assessment of the economy's growth over the long term, for the pace of technological advancement in the economy, and for estimates of the nation's wealth. In Measuring Capital in the New Economy, Carol Corrado, John Haltiwanger, Daniel Sichel, and a host of distinguished collaborators offer new approaches for measuring capital in an economy that is increasingly dominated by high-technology capital and intangible assets. As the contributors show, high-tech capital and intangible assets affect the economy in ways that are notoriously difficult to appraise. In this detailed and thorough analysis of the problem and its solutions, the contributors study the nature of these relationships and provide guidance as to what factors should be included in calculations of different types of capital for economists, policymakers, and the financial and accounting communities alike.
Structural change is a fundamental concept in economic model building. Statistics and econometrics provide the tools for identification of change, for estimating the onset of a change, for assessing its extent and relevance. Statistics and econometrics also have de veloped models that are suitable for picturing the data-generating process in the presence of structural change by assimilating the changes or due to the robustness to its presence. Important subjects in this context are forecasting methods. The need for such methods became obvious when, as a consequence of the oil price shock, the results of empirical analyses suddenly seemed to be much less reliable than before. Nowadays, economists agree that models with fixed structure that picture reality over longer periods are illusions. An example for less dramatic causes than the oil price shock with similarly profound effects is economic growth and its impacts on the economic system. Indeed, economic growth was a motivating concept for this volume. In 1983, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxen burg/ Austria initiated an ambitious project on "Economic Growth and Structural Change".