In this paper, we try to understand whether measures of GDP per capita taken from the national accounts or measures of mean income or consumption derived from household surveys better proxy for true income per capita. We propose a data-driven method to assess the relative quality of GDP per...

“Free” consumer entertainment and information from the Internet, largely supported by advertising revenues, has had a major impact on consumer behavior. Some economists believe that measured gross domestic product (GDP) growth since 2000 is too low because it excludes online entertainment...

In this paper we propose a novel approach to obtain the predictive density of global GDP growth. It hinges upon a bottom-up probabilistic model that estimates and combines single countries' predictive GDP growth densities, taking into account cross-country interdependencies. Specifically,we...

The UN System of National Accounts (SNA) calculates standard national income (NI) under the condition that owned capital is maintained. Roefie Hueting defined in 1969 environmental functions (state, stock) as the possible uses by humans of the environment. Their actual use (flow) nowadays are...

Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 represent a new global consensus to end poverty, promote prosperity, and protect the environment. Goal 8 seeks to improve global resource efficiency in consumption and production and to decouple economic growth...

While key macroeconomic indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Consumer Price Index (CPI) are based on internationally accepted methodologies, indicators related to the debt of the public sector often do not follow international standards and can have several different definitions....

The information revolution currently underway has changed the economy in ways that are hard to measure using conventional GDP procedures. The information available to consumers has increased dramatically as a result of the Internet and its applications, and new mobile communication devices have...

We evaluate the usefulness of satellite-based data on nighttime lights for the prediction of annual GDP growth across a global sample of countries. Going beyond traditional measures of luminosity, such as the sum of lights within a country's borders, we propose several innovative distribution-...

The number and the distribution of non-working days during the year has recently entered the policy debate related to the slow pace of the European economy.The fact that the number of non-working days can affect the quarter to quarter performance of GDP is well known and hardly disputable. It...