In this paper we propose a new approach to international comparisons of real GDP measured from the output-side. The traditional Geary-Khamis system to measure real GDP from the expenditure-side is modified to include differences in the terms of trade between countries. It is shown that this...

PPP-based national accounts have become an important part of the database for macroeconomists, development economists, and economic historians. Frequently used global data come from the Penn World Table (PWT) and the World Bank's World Development Indicators; a substantial fraction of the world...

As production comes to depend more on intangible productive assets, the location of production by multinational firms becomes increasingly ambiguous. The reason is that, within the firm, these assets have no clear geographical location, but only a nominal location determined by the firm's tax or...

The standard measures of flows and stocks of FDI view FDI as a financial flow and its accumulation as a stock, but most uses of FDI data require measures of employment, payrolls, capital inputs, and output from FDI. Judging by data for the United States, the flow and stock data provide rough...

The impacts of inward FDI on host countries are frequently studied using balance-of-payments based measures of flows and stocks. These are unreliable for the purpose because, while theories of the effects of investment are based on FDI production and employment in the host country, these...

A particularly serious problem of measurement is the growing transfer of intangible US corporate assets to foreign affiliates of US firms, some of which use virtually no foreign factors of production. These transfers, mainly for tax saving purposes, give rise to phantom flows of services from...

Fears that production abroad would cause home country exports and employment to fall have not been confirmed by evidence. Multinational operations have led to a shift by parent firms in the United States toward more capital- intensive and skill- intensive domestic production. However, that type...

The concept and measurement of foreign direct investment have changed over time, and what is measured by balance of payments flows and stocks is quite different from what is implied by theories of direct investment. The industrial distribution of stocks of FDI, the most widely available measure,...

In each of three financial and exchange rate crises, Latin America in 1982, Mexico in 1994, and East Asia in 1997, direct investment inflows into the affected countries have behaved differently from other forms of investment, and U.S. manufacturing affiliates have behaved differently from other...