This paper summarizes the outcomes of the first phase of the OECD human capital project. In so doing, it shows the feasibility of applying the lifetime income approach to measuring human capital for comparative analysis, both across countries and over time. It also highlights the feasibility of...

The paper reviews some national initiatives related to measuring the stock of human capital, indentifies some challenges to be addressed to improve the quality of existing monetary measures of human capital, and suggests developing experimental satellite accounts for education to better...

Since income is the return on wealth, the total wealth of any given country should be on the order of 20 times its gross domestic product. Instead the average observed ratio from the balance sheet accounts of the System of National Accounts is a factor of 2.6 to 6.6, depending on whether natural...

A major challenge in the measurement of well-being and progress is to link indicators of high-level societal outcomes with specific policy interventions. This is important not only for better informing the public, but also to provide the means for policy makers and advisors to assess the impacts...

Based on a production-theoretic framework, we measure the effects of real output prices, primary inputs, multi-factor productivity growth, and depreciation on Korea’s real net income growth over the past 30 years. The empirical analysis is based on a new dataset for Korea with detailed...

This paper looks beyond the broad notion of social capital – which has been applied to a number of different phenomena –in order to clarify (i) the range of different elements that are encompassed by the term; and (ii) what needs to be done to further statistical research and development in...

This paper uses data from the Gallup World Poll to explore the determinants of subjective well-being. The paper builds on the existing literature on the determinants of subjective well-being in three areas. First, the paper systematically examines the drivers of measures of affect as well as the...

The extent to which income inequality and poverty vary within countries across different regions is very relevant for policy decisions and monitoring. However, sub-national measures are scarce, given the complexity of producing indicators at the regional level from the available data and the...

We estimate the business-cycles of G7 countries, as defined by an ideal 2-10 year bandpass filter applied to country-specific GDP target series (GDP-BP). Since this target series cannot be observed in real-time, due to the symmetry of the bandpass filter, we analyze and compare the leading...

Time distance is an innovative approach for looking at time-series data. Expressed in time units, the approach is easy to understand and provides a useful complement to existing methods. The time distance approach compares time series in the horizontal dimension, i.e. for a given level of the...