Since the 1998 "wind of falsification and embellishment," Chinese official GDP statistics have repeatedly come under scrutiny. This paper evaluates the quality of China's GDP statistics in four stages. First, it reviews past and ongoing suspicions of the quality of GDP data and examines the...

On 9 January 2006, China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced a benchmark revision of GDP statistics for the years 1993-2004 based on the findings of the 2004 economic census. It released nominal values of GDP and sectoral value added (obtained following the production approach) for...

As Russia`s transition unfolds, the traditional national accounts concepts and reporting mechanisms become increasingly inadequate. As a result, the margin of error associated with basic price and quantity estimates widens substantially. A selection of key measurement and interpretation issues...

This paper unveils the mystery of national accounts statistics. National accounts statistics are not facts. They are estimates of a universal accounting model (SNA93) for describing, analyzing and managing national economies. The operational versions of the universal model decide what is...

To analyse the consequences of the changing economic structure of the UK, we need a set of statistics broken down by industry that are consistent with the whole economy measures available from the national accounts. The theory of growth accounting then provides a framework in which the...

This paper presents the new yearly series of the value-added of services for Italy, from 1861 to 1951, at current prices. For each sector, after discussing sources and methodology, the results are compared with the early Istat (1957) series. By looking at the production value of specific...

In modern economies, technical change is rapid and competitive edges of companies are closely related to 'intangible' capital. While some intangibles are covered by established capital measures in the national accounts, many are outside the measurement boundary. The NBER volume at hand brings...

We present an approach for estimating time series of a set of latent variables satisfying accounting identities. We concentrate on a simple case study and comment on possible generalizations. The model consists of three main parts: (i) A system of accounting identities, e.g., a subsystem of the...

Following Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (2005) this paper investigates French spending in intangible capital. In this work, we tackle two issues. First, working on national accounting data we sharply investigate the data sources, using detailed supply & use tables taken from the French national...