This chapter covers the theory and methods for productivity measurement for nations. Labor, multifactor and total factor productivity measures are defined and are related to each other and to gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Their growth over time and relative counterparts are defined as...

In this chapter, we review the concept of national income and the economic theory of national income accounting. There are two building blocks – the ideas of Fisher, Lindahl, Hicks about income as an expenditure level that can be continued into the future, and the concept of income as a...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Prescription Drug Consumer Price Index (CPI-Rx) has been the focus of considerable controversy in recent years. The CPI-Rx limits its sampling frame to transactions in retail outpatient outlets, and excludes prescription pharmaceuticals dispensed in hospitals,...

GDP is a closely watched indicator of the current health of the economy and an important tool of economic policy. It has been called one of the great inventions of the 20th Century. It is not, however, a persuasive indicator of individual wellbeing or economic progress. There have been calls to...

We build and analyze new metrics of digital usage that leverage telemetry data collected by Microsoft during operating system updates across forty million Windows devices in U.S. households. These measures of US household digital usage are much more comprehensive than those made available...

A method is proposed to measure capital services in production. This means that productive assets are weighted according to their user costs. The user costs of the individual asset classes are estimated based on data from the national accounts and other sources. The results show that, in the...

This paper focuses on the question whether West German firms have experienced an increase in their financial risk position with due implications for the macroeconomy. The investigation is based on a special evaluation of the balance sheet statistics by the Deutsche Bundesbank broken down into...

The changes in the financial structures of West German industrial enterprises have been investigated in Größl/Stahlecker/Wohlers (2001). The empirical analysis confirmed the hypothesis that small and medium-sized enterprises are confronted with higher - and even rising - financial risks than...