This article describes how the quarterly output of the financial services sector is measured in the National Accounts. Then at a sub-sector level, an analysis of recent employment and output trends is presented to describe the impact of the current economic downturn on the activity of the...

Methods explainedThe concept of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) originated in the UnitedStates in the 1930s where it was used to create a solution toproblems of water provision. The process arrived in the UK in the1960s for use in the transportation sector, where it was applied tothe construction of...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or the size of the economy, can be measured in three ways. These are the output, income and expenditure approaches. ONS routinely measures all three for the UK economy, but publishes a single 'coherent' estimate of GDP. This article explains the role of alignment...

Highlights relationships within component inventories data,between GDP and inventories and the relative importance of individual sectors' holdingsThere are a number of contrasting economic theories regarding companies’ motivations for holding inventories. One theory suggests firms use...

SUMMARYThe household saving ratio summarises the income and expenditure positions of the household sector. This article considers developments in the ratio during the current recession, discussing the drivers in income and consumption and their interaction in the context of developments in the...

We examine the relationship between capitalism and income inequality for a large sample of countries using an adjusted economic freedom index as proxy for capitalism and Gini coefficients based on gross-income as proxy for income inequality. Our results suggest that there is no robust...

Does increased policy uncertainty dampen investment plans of firms? We provide direct evidence on this question by examining the effects of an unexpectedly accepted and farreaching referendum in Switzerland in February 2014. The vote has put several economically relevant agreements between...

Using a panel fixed effects model for a sample of 121 countries covering 1975-2005, we examine how financial development, financial liberalization and banking crises are related to income inequality. In contrast with most previous work, our results suggest that all finance variables increase...

Michael Grossman's human capital model of the demand for health has been argued to be one of the major achievements in theoretical health economics. Attempts to test this model empirically have been sparse, however, and with mixed results. These attempts so far relied on using - mostly...

In this paper we present and describe the revised version of the KOF Globalisation Index, a composite index measuring globalisation for every country in the world along the economic, social and political dimension. The original index was introduced by Dreher (2006) and updated in Dreher et al....