Productivity data on the business sector, which covers around 75% of the economy, provide important information on the evolution of living standards. The data on multifactor productivity (MFP) growth and labor productivity growth produced by the official statistical agency in Canada (Statistics...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a thorough discussion of the definitional and data issues associated with the measurement of aggregate labour productivity growth in Canada and the United States. The paper examines all data sources for output, employment and hours estimates in the two...

Since the mid-nineties, U.S. labor productivity outgrows its European counterpart by a wide margin. Several recent studies have found that this result is brought about by relatively few service industries, where productivity growth has accelerated in the U.S., but not so in Europe. Based on this...

This paper shows that, under the price fluctuations that characterize most transition economies, the commonly used chain index derived from the published month-to-month price change of the producer price index (PPI) in most cases dramatically overstates the rate of price inflation. This drift,...

The main approaches to measuring hedonic indexes in the academic literature are the imputation approach and the time dummy approach. This paper compares both approaches, discusses an alternative method called hedonic re-pricing, and comments on a recent contribution by Diewert et al. (2009). The...

The New Stochastic Approach (NSA) – unjustly – pretends to promote a better understanding of price index (PI) formulas by viewing them as regression coefficients. As prices in the NSA are assumed to be collected in a random sample (what is particularly at odds with official price...

We define a class of bias problems that arise when purchasers shift their expenditures among sellers charging different prices for units of precisely defined and interchangeable product items that are nevertheless regarded as different for the purposes of price measurement. For...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the changeover's inflationary impact in Italy and Milan and make an assessment of the official methodology used by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). The changeover's inflationary impact has been estimated in 0.6-0.7 percentage points in Italy,...