This article presents the first attempt to create historical national accounts for Cyprus and Malta. It is part of an ongoing effort to place the unusually violent period of these two small British colonies in a greater Mediterranean and Colonial perspective, by providing macroeconomic...

Focus of interest in this paper is the concept of competitiveness as measured by the originally developed index of business environment. Competitiveness is interpreted in the broader meaning of the term: it includes not only cost conditions, but also institutional and system conditions of...

This paper provides an introductory overview of the meaning and measurement of national accounts statistics. Attention is paid to the various uses of national accounts, the role of the international guidelines, the relationship with economic theoretic and administrative concepts and the...

Measurement quality is a fundamental factor in determining the cost of transactions within organizations and markets. A huge gulf separates the meaningfulness and precision of business metrics as currently achieved from the quality that has been routinely obtained for decades in research and in...

Measured rates of growth in real per capita income differ drastically depending on the data source. This phenomenon occurs largely because data sets differ in whether and how they adjust for changes in relative prices across countries. Replication of several recent studies of growth determinants...

Countries compiling quarterly estimates for gross domestic product (GDP) often use alternative approaches simultaneously. This may result in the publication of different measures of quarterly GDP and discrepancies between these measures. Such discrepancies are unavoidable, unless reconciliation...

Comprehensive coverage of national accounts estimates is important; however, it is often thwarted by gaps in the recording of economic activity - the so-called unrecorded economy. This paper sets out pragmatic statistical approaches for incorporating the unrecorded economy in the national...

I study the manipulation of GDP growth statistics in non-democracies by comparing the self-reported GDP figures to the nighttime lights recorded by satellites from outer space. I show that the night-lights elasticity of GDP is systematically larger in more authoritarian regimes. This autocracy...

In this paper we study the dynamics of economic growth for 140 countries during the period 1951-2003. The variables representing economic performance are levels and growth rates of per capita GDP. Using the concept of economic regime, we introduce a notion of distance between the dynamical paths...