National statistical agencies frequently assume very high geometric depreciation rates in order to capture the fact that computers are usually retired after 3 or 4 years of use. However, typically the service flow that a computer generates over its useful life is roughly constant, which...

The paper studies the problems associated with the construction of price indexes for commercial properties that could be used in the System of National Accounts. Property price indexes are required for the stocks of commercial properties in the Balance Sheets of the country and related price...

Caves, Christensen, Diewert introduced Malmquist output, input and productivity indexes into production theory in a systematic way. This paper revisits the debate on how to decompose Bjurek’s concept of a Malmquist productivity index into explanatory factors, with a focus on extracting...

The paper illustrates how various commonly used index number formulae perform using monthly data on seasonal commodities (seven types of vegetable) that was collected by the Israeli Consumer Price Index program. The paper calculates standard Laspeyres, Paasche and Fisher indexes (fixed base and...

An earlier paper by Diewert (2013) provided some new decompositions of economy wide labour productivity growth and Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth into sectoral effects. The economy wide labour productivity growth rate turned out to depend on the sectoral labour productivity growth rates,...

The paper obtains relatively simple exact expressions that relate value added Total Factor Productivity growth (TFP growth or Multifactor Productivity Growth) in a value added framework to the corresponding measures of TFP growth in a gross output framework when Laspeyres or Paasche indexes are...

The paper addresses two problems: (i) how to measure aggregate real output and inflation for a group of countries and (ii) how to construct measures of real GDP for a group of countries where the country measures of real GDP are comparable across time and space. In order to address the second...

The paper considers the problem of choosing a multilateral system of index numbers in order to make aggregate price and quantity comparisons between many countries and regions. The problems involved in choosing functional forms in order to make these comparisons are both theoretically and...

Statistical offices try to match item models when measuring inflation between two periods. However, for product areas with a high turnover of differentiated models, the use of hedonic indexes is more appropriate since they include the prices and quantities of unmatched new and old models. The...

In a 1993 paper, Marshall Reinsdorf finds that the CPI components for food and gas were biased upward by about 2% and 1% per year respectively during the 1980s. He attributes this result to outlet substitution bias. The more recent paper by Reinsdorf and Moulton [1994] presents an alternative...