The paper disputes the frequently presented and quoted statement that in post-socialist economies data on power consumption are better indicators for aggregate output changes than data on official GDP. Attempt is made to show that the variation of electricity intensities in post-socialist...

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...