Index numbers are used to aggregate detailed information on prices and quantities into scalar measures of price and quantity levels or their growth. The paper reviews four main approaches to bilateral index number theory where two price and quantity vectors are to be aggregated: fixed basket and...

The paper briefly reviews the accomplishments of the Ottawa Group on the occasion of its tenth meeting and then goes on to list ten problem areas in price measurement that have not been completely resolved and hence should be a focus of future meetings. The ten problem areas are: (1) the...

The paper explains new methodology that was used in the 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP) that compared the relative price levels and GDP levels across 146 countries. In this round of the ICP, the world was divided into 6 regions: OECD, CIS, Africa, South America, Asia Pacific and West...

Tang and Wang provided a decomposition of economy wide labour productivity into sectoral contribution effects. The present note reworks their methodology to provide a more transparent and simple decomposition. This new decomposition is then related to another decomposition due to Gini and...

In this paper, we measure the main factors explaining nominal output growth and deviations from trend output in Switzerland over the period 1980 to 2001. The decompositions are based on the GDP function and its dual, the national income function. The results indicate that whereas nominal output...

This paper develops a novel multilateral test approach to the problem of international comparisons. Many of the associated tests are justi¯ed as\reasonable" using the fact that they are direct analogues to properties of the cost-of-living index. Further support is bestowed upon the new approach...

This paper reports new aggregate and industry productivity series for the New Zealand economy for the period 1988 to 2002. These productivity series are intended for ongoing monitoring of New Zealand’s productivity performance and for use in further analyses investigating the evolution,...

This paper studies different explanations given for the "price decline anomaly" in sequential auctions, a phenomenon also known as the "afternoon effect". It surveys the dedicated theoretical models and then explores the influence of the institutional or market characteristics (of the sale) on...

A new method is introduced and applied to analyse changes in productivity of firms harvesting a natural capital stock. The index-number technique decomposes the contributions of output prices, variable input prices, fixed inputs and productivity to firm profits, adjusted for changes in the...

This paper provides an introduction to productivity measurement using index number techniques. Attention is given to the construction of productivity series using common index number formulae, the economic and axiomatic approaches to selecting an index number formula, and the use of chaining....