China's investment rate is one of the highest in the world, which naturally leads one to suspect that the return to capital in China must be quite low. Using the data from China's national accounts, we estimate the rate of return to capital in China. We find that the aggregate rate of return to...

In 1961, Nicholas Kaldor highlighted six "stylized" facts to summarize the patterns that economists had discovered in national income accounts and to shape the growth models being developed to explain them. Redoing this exercise today shows just how much progress we have made. In contrast to...

This paper describes recent trends in productivity growth in the EU and the US. By adopting a sectoral perspective, we achieve a deeper understanding of the compositional patterns of aggregate growth and shed light on the reasons why the EU productivity has lagged behind the US during the period...

Monthly economic indicators are used for a variety of purposes, from studying business cycles to determining economic policy and making informed business decisions. China's published monthly industrial output statistics could hardly be more confusing, with changes in variables, in coverage, in...

Using a dynamic factor model that allows for changes in both the long- run growth rate of output and the volatility of business cycles, we document a significant decline in long-run output growth in the United States. Our evidence supports the view that this slowdown started prior to the Great...

Potential growth estimates and forecasts generally rely on a decomposition of GDP growth into three production factors: the volume of labour, the volume of capital and a residual term called multifactor productivity (MFP). This residual term is often considered as the contribution to growth of...

We (a) propose an implementable innovation index, (b) relate it to existing innovation definitions and (c) show whole-economy and industry-specific results for the UK market sector, 2000-2005. Our innovation measure starts by observing that we could get more GDP without innovation by simply...

This paper analyzes the sources of recent U.S. productivity growth using both aggregate and industry-level data. The paper confirms the central role of information technology in the productivity revival during 1995-2000 and shows that it played a significant, although smaller, role after 2000....

Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more...

This paper looks at the channels through which intangible assets affect productivity. The econometric analysis exploits a new dataset on intangible investment (INTAN-Invest) in conjunction with EUKLEMS productivity estimates for 10 EU member states from 1998 to 2007. We find that (a) the...