This paper uses revealed preference restrictions and nonparametric statistical methods to bound true cost-of-living indices. These are compared to the popular price indices including the type used to calculated the UK RPI. This is used to assess the method of calculating the RPI for substitution...

This paper studies the problems of measuring economic growth under conditions of high inflation. Traditional bilateral index number theory implicitly assumes that variations in the price of a commodity within a period can be ignored. In order to justify this assumption under conditions of high...

Unit labor cost (ULC) is defined as labor compensation per value added. It captures the cost competitiveness of industries and countries. As labor compensation is wage multiplied by hours worked or number of people employed, it is easy to show that ULC is wage divided by labor productivity....

Changing the base year (1985) of Philippine GDP in constant prices could change the growth rate and the shares of components even when there is no change in the volume of production, implying that the changes in growth rate and shares are anomalous (i.e., no real basis). This possibility weakens...

This paper’s framework for GDP in chained prices yields GDP in constant prices as a special case of constant relative prices, i.e., these GDP measures differ only when relative prices change. The framework has a novel additive procedure, counter to the prevailing view that GDP in chained...

In the light of the current economic debt crisis within the Euro zone, the heterogeneity of EU members has becoming increasingly apparent. This heterogeneity is evident not only in some single macroeconomic variables but also in the level of economic integration with the other EU members....

In this paper, employing several econometric techniques, the authors construct a financial stress index (CNFSI) and a financial conditions index (CNFCI) to measure the instability of China's financial system. The indices are based on the monthly data collected from China's inter-bank markets,...

Existing indices of ethnic diversity are generally based on pre-defined groups, disregarding the (dis)similarities between them. This paper proposes an index that includes the dissimilarity in language, ethno-racial characteristcs and religion between groups. The resulting distance-adjusted...

The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is not the first attempt to examine poverty along multiple definitions. Vis-a-vis the existing work and other presently available measures, this method has greater advantage in terms of international comparability and reporting. However, the methodology...

Measurable aspects of the economic convergence of EU countries form the main topic of this paper. For this purpose, statistical and econometric methods are presented and applied for revealing characteristic elements of such a process. A first group of methods refers mainly to aspects such as:...