D. N. McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak have criticized economists and others for confounding statistical and substantive significance, and for committing the logical error of the transposed conditional. In doing so they sometimes misinterpret the function of significance tests. Nonetheless,...

This analysis is based on the optimal consistency method (OCM) proposed by Albala-Bertrand (2003), which enables to estimate a capital stock for a benchmark year. This method, in contrast to most current approaches, pays due regards both to potential output and to the productivity of capital....

There are alternative methods of estimating capital stock for a benchmark year. However, these methods are costly and time-consuming, requiring the gathering of much basic information as well as the use of some convenient assumptions and guesses. In addition, a way is needed of checking whether...

When a significance test fails to disconfirm a hypothesis economist often interpret this as evidence that this hypothesis is valid. Six such examples are cited from recent journals. But this is a misinterpretation of what significance tests show. Presumably this misinterpretation is founded on...

Economists sometimes interpret the failure of a significance test to disconfirm a hypothesis as evidence that this hypothesis is valid. Six examples of this are cited from recent journals. But this is a as interpretation of what significance tests show. While in general it is correct that every...

This paper is a continuation of our study of structural change in China and deals with the changes of domestic industrial/sectoral backward and forward linkages (i.e. the pull and push of the economy) as well as the changes in their domestic and imported components (i.e. via import...

Community currency systems are now turning to digital methods to increase the social outreach of member households in remote areas, mitigate detrimental effects in times of crises, and promote community social cohesion. The resilience of digital community currency systems depends on a set of...

This paper deals with some structural indicators and their evolution, in China and regions, over the period 1981-2010. We first produce estimates of the optimal productivities of incremental capital and the optimal incremental income elasticity of capital by means of a linear programming...