The next international version of the System of National Accounts will recommend that R&D (Research and Development) expenditures be capitalized instead of being immediately expensed as in the present <italic>System of National Accounts 1993</italic>. An R&D project creates a new technology, which in principle...

Profitability at a period of time is defined as the value of outputs produced by a production unit divided by the corresponding cost. Using some earlier work by O?Donnell, the paper provides a decomposition of profitability growth over two periods into various explanatory factors. The...

This paper provides methodologies for evaluating consumer benefits of infrastructure services using potentially observable information. We define benefit measures for consumers and, using general principles from the index number literature, derive alternative first and second order...

There is policy interest in factoring productivity growth into technical progress and returns to scale components. Our approach uses exact index number methods to reduce the parameters that must be estimated, and allows us to exploit the cross-sectional dimension of plant-level panel data. We...

This chapter reviews the theory underlying the index number approaches used by National Statistical Offices in the construction of productivity indexes. It covers approaches for measuring output, labour and capital and highlights persistent and emerging measurement problems.