Scotland's economic performance and fiscal make-up are key elements in the debate leading up to the forthcoming referendum on independence. However, in terms of understanding Scotland's economic performance, the situation is complicated by the high degree of overseas ownership, especially with...

If official figures overstated the growth of banking output in the UK in the recent boom, does this mean that GDP growth was overstated too? The answer is no. It is truer to say that if banking output was overstated then the output of some other industry or industries must have been understated,...

Detailed analysis of BEA methodology and data strongly suggests that U.S. GDP is overvalued on the output side. The ability to generate income without producing real value-added output is a key characteristic of a “rentier economy.†Broader indicators include a massive increase in...

As domestic exports usually require imported inputs, the value of exports differs from the domestic value added contained in exports. The higher the domestic value added contained in exports, the higher the domestic national income created by exports will be. In this case, exports will expand...

For many years, the World Bank has reported estimates of the degree of sustainability of the world’s economies using a measure of adjusted net savings. We construct long-run sustainability indicators for Germany over the period 1850-2000 to test the relationship between these net savings-based...

This study shows that Target2 net claims are a poor measure of Bundesbank loss exposure, and even more so of German loss exposure to the rest of the Eurozone. This is true even under plausible assumptions about a comprehensive break-up scenario that leaves Germany as the only member of the euro...

Comparisons of economic performance over space and time largely depend on how statistical evidence from national accounts and historical estimates are spliced. To allow for changes in relative prices, GDP benchmark years in national accounts are periodically replaced with new and more recent...

This paper looks at the channels through which intangible assets affect productivity. The econometric analysis exploits a new dataset on intangible investment (INTAN-Invest) in conjunction with EUKLEMS productivity estimates for 10 EU member states from 1998 to 2007. We find that (a) the...

We present a Bayesian estimation method applied to an extended set of national accounts data and estimates of approximately 2500 variables. The method is based on conventional national accounts frameworks as compiled by countries in Central America, in particular Guatemala, and on concepts that...

We build China's national production function based on national accounting data since 1997, when China primarily transformed from the Planned economy to Market. By proxying and measuring stocks of human capital(HC), physical capital and the efficiency units, as well as government expenditure...