The OECD developed a System of Composite Leading indicators for its Member countries in the early 1980's based on the 'growth cycle' approach. Today the OECD compiles composite leading indicators (CLIs) for 23 of its 30 Member countries and it is envisaged to expand country coverage to include...

The first releases of official statistics are often revised in subsequent releases, sometimes substantially. Such revisions can impact on policy decisions, as revisions to first published data may alter the previous assessment of the state of the economy. This may occur through a changed...

The OECD developed a System of Composite Leading Indicators (CLIs) for its Member Countries in the early 1980?s based on the ?growth cycle? approach and up to 2006 the Organisation compiled composite leading indicators for 23 of the 30 Member countries. Country coverage has now been expanded to...

Effective business cycle analysis, and indeed the monitoring of a country’s economic performance from a policy perspective, requires access to timely high quality short-term economic statistics (STES). Consequently in recent years there has been a lot of pressure on national statistics...

The purpose of this working paper is to provide an overview of recent discussions on the quality of Chinese data, and to describe and evaluate the institutional organization and methods of data compilation in China. The first part outlines key criticisms of Chinese data and examines their...

Using new sectoral data on investment and capital services we carry out a growth accounting exercise on Spain 1985-2002. We compute the contribution to output and labour productivity growth of employment, non-ICT and ICT capital, labour qualification and Total Factor Productivity. Results are...

Services are increasingly important in modern economies contributing about 68% of world economy value added in 2002 and, although at a much lower level, are increasingly traded internationally (see Table 1). These patterns of increasing importance of services are observed in the generality of...

This Handbook aims to provide a guide for constructing and using composite indicators for policy makers, academics, the media and other interested parties. While there are several types of composite indicators, this Handbook is concerned with those which compare and rank country performance in...

Over the past years, non-standard, flexible employment contracts have gained in importance in many OECD countries. This has made it difficult for statisticians to apply standard classifications of working arrangements to measure and analyse labour market developments. This paper presents a new...

This statistical working paper is the exact copy of the report of the joint OECD/Eurostat task force that was presented at the October 2002 OECD National Accounts Expert Meeting. The report confirms that current estimates of software investment differ significantly between countries for pure...