bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
THE UNITED NATIONS SYSTEM OF NATIONAL ACCOUNTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Authors: Porter R. S. 
Published: March 2005

After an introduction setting out the general state of work on the national accounts in the Middle East the author considers the principal uses of national accounts statistics in less developed countries. The first group of uses discussed is in connexion with the measurement of growth and the making of international comparisons. The author is of the opinion that in many cases the primary statistical series are so weak that the fact they they are combined together into a series called national income or gross domestic product lends to them a significance which they do not really possess. The real problem is to improve the quality of the primary series.A second use of national accounts statistics is in connexion with fiscal and budgetary policy. In the statistically advanced countries this is one of the most important uses but in the less developed countries budgetary policy has not yet reached a level of sophistication which would call for the use of national accounts data. Moreover, the time factor involved in assembling accurate national accounts estimates militates against their effective use for short term forecasting.The author considers that the most important use for national accounts statistics is to provide a framework for development planning. The United Nations system is not altogether appropriate for this purpose. It grew up primarily as a system for recording income flows but in development planning one is concerned equally with commodity flows with a great deal of attention being focussed upon intermediate products. The proposals of the working group of African Statisticians for an adaptation of the S.N.A. to African countries represents a most important advance in this respect.In the final section of the paper the author advocates a broader definition of capital formation to include developmental expenditure which is not properly defined as fixed capital formation. Education expenditure is cited as an example. It is suggested that in the national accounts it would be desirable to operate with gross concepts. However, the growth of the capital stock is obviously important in less developed countries and it is suggested that statistical techniques be devised to measure it directly wherever possible. Finally, attention is drawn to the ambiguities and weaknesses in the concept of residence as used at present in the S.N.A.
A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF PRODUCTIVITY IN SELECTED SERVICE INDUSTRIES IN THE UNITED STATES, 1939–1963
Authors: Fuchs Victor R. 
Published: March 2005

This paper examines differentials in output, employment and productivity across seventeen service industries in the United States from 1939 to 1963. Included are 9 retail trades and 8 services mostly from the personal service group. The industries chosen were those for which it was possible to obtain from available data reasonably comparable measures of output and input for selected years since 1939. Also, they are industries for which it is possible to calculate a measure of real output that is not based on labor input.Sixteen of the industries show positive rates of change of real output per man. Thus there appears to be no basis for assuming that productivity cannot or does not increase in industries providing services. However, the rate of increase for the group as a whole was not as rapid as in manufacturing or in goods production as a whole.The data for the seventeen industries give strong support to the hypothesis of a positive correlation between industry rates of growth and rates of change of productivity. The correlations are of the same order of magnitude as those found by other investigators in studies of manufacturing industries.The coefficient of correlation between growth of output per man and growth of output is .93; between growth of output per man and growth of employment it is .54 for 1939–1963. The comparable coefficients for the 1948–1963 period are .70 and .13.The results also parallel those reported for manufacturing in one other respect, namely, the absence of any correlation between changes in output per man and changes in compensation per man.The paper concludes with a discussion of the problems encountered in measuring changes in real output in these industries and presents some alternative estimates based on different concepts and different sources.
THE ACCOUNTS AND THE COMPUTER
Authors: Lebergott Stanley 
Published: March 2005

(1) The primary contribution from the computer's application to the national accounts may well be to erode the line between micro and macro analysis. Key macro totals in the accounts sum individual company reports. The computer permits us to develop distributions of these reports. Such distributions, regularly presented, would permit discovery of the first forerunners of change, would help distinguish, e.g., widespread strength in an export drive or a profits surge, from participation by a few major concerns that dominate the aggregate.(2) The strikingly different parameters in cross section and time series studies (e.g., price elasticity of housing) will in some measure reflect incomparability between the micro data that enter into each. The computer makes possible the use of the wide array of micro data that really underly the accounts to develop consistent analyses of time series (of both aggregates and distributions) and cross section analyses.(3) The inconsistencies now imbedded in the accounts but gilded over by the abilities of the estimators are well‐known. Discussions of wage price policy rest on data for wages that have no necessary compatibility with data on profits, etc. But since 1,500 corporations account for at least half of U.S. net income, sales, and investment, the computer can test the consistency of reports made by different units in these firms to different agencies—a process totally out of the question before the computer.(4) The potential that the computer offers for prompt revisions in the accounts; for revisions by systematic rule; for tests of sensitivity of the entire set of accounts to particular tailor‐made adjustments, is clear.(5) Company purchase orders and accounts are increasingly recorded on cards or tapes. From these we may derive input‐output detail and process detail that are light years better than those now feasible from intermittent survey aggregates.
AN APPROPRIATE SYSTEM FOR DEFLATION OF SECTORAL INCOME IN A DEVELOPING ECONOMY ILLUSTRATED BY THE INDUSTRIAL SECTOR OF THE INDIAN ECONOMY FROM 1951 to 1965*
Authors: Mathur P. N. 
Published: March 2005

The technique of national income accounting is a part of what Hicks has termed “The Fixprice Method”. Deflation is an attempt to approximate a real economy to a fixprice economy. It is shown that if the propositions of macro‐dynamics are to hold, this deflation cannot be done in accordance with the price structure prevailing at any particular historical time, but must use that given by the capital theory of value, viz., when returns to labour are equal to zero. For a labour‐abundant developing economy this will correspond to prices based on opportunity cost principles.As an illustration, sectoral incomes on this basis have been calculated for the industrial sector of the Indian economy for the years 1951 to 1965.
A NAIVE HISTORY OF INDIVIDUAL INCOMES IN WISCONSIN, 1947–1959
Authors: David Martin , Miller Roger , Moyer Eugene , Bauman Richard , Schneidemesser Michael von 
Published: March 2005

The paper develops a descriptive history of the changing level and sources of income of the male population of Wisconsin from 1947 to 1959, as a preliminary step in building a model of income determination. The history is based on data from a one percent sample of the taxpaying population of Wisconsin from 1947 to 1959. Analysis of income sources received by male birth cohorts is followed by summary data on individual income variation.Changes in earnings of birth cohorts appear to be determined by changes in labor force participation, general productivity increases, and acquisition of skills. Education, as reflected in occupational status, appears to affect the initial level and lifetime profile of earnings; however, education has played a changing role in the dynamics of earnings.Movements in non‐earned income appear to be determined by rising real yields on capital, accumulation of wealth, and possibly by asset conversion and selective migration and mortality favoring wealth holders. Cohort asset accumulation for the period seems to have been determined by the growth rate of earnings, life cycle contingencies, and the pattern of asset prices and yields during the period.Analysis of individuals’ incomes over the period reveals great heterogeneity of experience of individuals within birth cohorts and within occupations. This suggests that study of micro units is necessary to obtain behavioral information obscured in aggregate cohort data.
PRICE STATISTICS REQUIRED BY DEVELOPING COUNTRIES FOR NATIONAL ACCOUNTING PURPOSES
Authors: Braithwaite Stanley N. 
Published: March 2005

In both developed and developing countries, the national accounting statistician who wishes to establish a composite set of values in current and base year prices is faced with a series of difficulties arising from a lack of indicators which are adequate for relating quantities and values within the national accounting framework. Consequently, ad hoc solutions are extensively adopted and use is made of price data which in the majority of cases have been collected for completely different purposes. The inter‐relationship of prices, quantities and values fundamental to the compatibility of the national accounts can therefore be, and often is, a rather tenuous one. In the case of many developing countries, the situation is accentuated by a very volatile behaviour of prices, a greater impact of price change and a much greater scarcity of useable statistical material. In addition, since structural change is frequently implicit in a development process, the pattern of values and of prices is often variable and irregular—this in turn creates problems in determining relative importance, in assigning weights and in imputing for prices of items not directly entering into the calculation of the indicators.This paper analyses the series which are most commonly available, it points out the major deficiencies or limitations and it attempts to formulate a few guide‐lines for determining priorities called for in an integrated network of price statistics.
AN INDEX NUMBER APPROACH TO THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON OF CONSUMPTION: WESTERN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES*
Authors: Toda Yasushi 
Published: March 2005

The quantity index comparing the per capita consumption of one country vis‐à‐vis the other often gives widely different figures, depending on which country's prices are used as “weights”. In this paper, this gap between two quantity indexes is divided into a substitution effect and an income effect by assuming common tastes between nations. For this division, we estimate the points of over‐compensated variation and under‐compensated variation in income from Gilbert and Kravis’data.The results of our estimation show that the income effect is smaller than the substitution effect. But the sign of the income effect indicates that this effect is generally in the same direction as the difference between two quantity indexes. Translated into the Bortkiewicz covariance, this means that the income elasticities are inversely related to the relative prices; the higher the income elasticity of a good, the lower is its price in the high income country relative to the low income country.Since we only approximate the points of exactly compensated variation in income, we cannot estimate “true” quantity indexes. However, our result implies that the two indexes in Gilbert and Kravis’data do form the upper and lower boundaries to the true index‐numbers.
NATIONAL ACCOUNTING AS A PLANNING TOOL IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES: LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE
Authors: Barkay Richard M. 
Published: March 2005

This paper is directed at the following question: How far is the national accounting system as developed in the industrially advanced countries and recommended by the United Nations applicable and useful to countries at an early stage of development? In order to examine the suitability of this tool, the nature of economic policy decisions and their dependence on macro‐statistical constructs are analysed, the emphasis being on planning as actually undertaken in the field or going to be undertaken in the near future and not on planning activities as possibly ought to be attempted. The conclusion reached, based upon personal experience in Africa, the Caribbean area, Brazil and Venezuela, both as “producer” and “user” of data, is that planning is mainly limited to the public sector. Comprehensive plans, prepared with the assistance of foreign consultants, were generally forgotten soon after publication, the driving force behind those plans being external pressure by bilateral donors and international agencies and propaganda‐prestige motives. Real over‐all economic management or consistent medium term planning of the whole economy never appeared to be an important factor in the decision‐making process, possibly because those concepts are far too abstract and do not have short‐term impact.The role of national accounting should therefore be limited to the provision of a general framework and factual support for public sector planning activities. In practice the United Nations system has been found far too complicated and ambitious, not sufficiently development planning oriented, and not suitable to the limited statistical resources available in the developing countries.The paper recommends the publication of several detailed “case studies” in national accounting, hoping that those studies might help to identify types of accounting systems appropriate to different existing constellations. In the meantime a drastic scaling down of the United Nations system should be undertaken; we should try to equate demand and supply of relevant information.In the final part, the paper considers planning requirements (timetable and flexibility, information required for a general assessment of the economy, crucial role of the publicsector, relative precision), statistical requirements (resources, data available, priorities, international reporting) and decision‐makers’requirements (compactness, simplicity, background information, wishes of external aid donors) and recommends, as an interim measure, a simplified system of national accounts consisting of eight main tables.
ASSESSING THE QUALITY ERROR IN OUTPUT MEASURES: THE CASE OF REFRIGERATORS*
Authors: Triplett Jack E. , McDonald Richard J. 
Published: March 2005

This paper computes new indexes of output for refrigerators, using hedonic methods to adjust for quality change. The hedonic technique is applied in a new way (it is used to make quality adjustments to prices before they are used in the index), and the results are compared with those from methods used in previous hedonic investigations.There are three major findings. (1) Overall (1960–1972), our hedonic deflated output series rise more rapidly than conventional measures, because the price indexes used for deflation rise more slowly. (2) The output measures fluctuate more than do output measures produced by conventional methods, because adding hedonic quality adjustments to WPI indexes moves them up in some years and down in others, and the resulting adjustments to the output series were positively correlated with changes in output. (3) Applying methods used in previous studies produces larger adjustments to the published indexes, suggesting that some of the differences noted in previous studies between hedonic indexes and official published indexes are related to computational methods, not to quality adjustment.
FINDING THE POOR
Authors: Ferber Robert , Musgrove Philip 
Published: March 2005

As a basis for judging how public policy affects the poor, this article explores how “poor” families may be defined and how well such families can be distinguished from other families in the less developed countries. This is done by seeking proxies for poverty which are relatively easy to measure, accurate in discriminating between the poor and the non‐poor, and relevant to public policy. To this end, a highly parsimonious model is developed, based on truncation and regression procedures, using only family size and number of wage earners in addition to either income or an education‐age combination. Application of this model to data from household surveys in three major cities of Latin America shows that the model is highly effective in pinpointing poverty households, although the pattern of errors is not random, the most frequent type of error being to classify poverty households as non‐poor.Especially significant is that the model is nearly as effective for discriminating poverty households from others when financial variables are excluded as when they are included. This would suggest that a good deal of flexibility exists in deciding what variables to include in future studies of this type. The results also suggest that even better results should be possible if more complete information is obtained on the employment status of the different members of the household and on the contribution of each to household income. Ideally, the data collection and model development should proceed in an iterative manner since there are numerous possible variables as well as alternative model formulations.
CHANGES IN INCOME INEQUALITY: AUSTRALIA, 1968–69 TO 1973–74
Authors: Murray David 
Published: March 2005

The period 1968–69 to 1973–74 saw a redistribution of incomes in Australia. This is evidenced first by declining differentials between dissimilar persons and secondly by changes in two measures of income inequality, the Gini and Theil coefficients.The inequality coefficients are decomposed into components which distinguish between that part of total inequality due to income differences between dissimilar persons and that part due to inequality between similar persons. It is found that the reduction in inequality was due to the reduction in differentials between dissimilar persons and that inequality between similar persons probably did not change over the period.
MEASURING INTERNATIONAL AND INTER‐SECTORAL TERMS OF TRADE: SOME METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
Authors: Derksen J. B. D. 
Published: March 2005

The view is expressed that the well‐known formulae for measuring changes in terms of trade cannot be used to conclude whether a country is better off or not. Other variables which reflect the impact upon production, employment, and the competitive position should also be taken into account.Similarly, changes in terms of trade between the industrial sectors of an economy cannot be used to conclude whether one sector is better off than others. Other factors which play a role include increases in productivity per man‐hour. These may help to explain why in some sectors prices increase less than in others. An attempt is made to illustrate this point using some statistics for the Netherlands.
INCOME INEQUALITY AND POVERTY: SOME PROBLEMS
Authors: Thon Dominique 
Published: March 2005

In an important recent book dealing with the measurement of income inequality with particular reference to poverty,1 Prof. N. Kakwani derives several poverty indices, investigates the effect of negative income tax schemes with the help of those indices and gives a numerical illustration based on Malaysian data.The aim of this note is to point out some logical flaws in his argument. Some of the ideas expressed in the part of his book we are concerned with have been disseminated for some time now2 and referred to in subsequent literature;3 yet their shortcomings do not seem to have attracted anyone's attention. The introductory section gives a concise presentation of the relevant part of Kakwani's contribution. The next two sections deal with some problems with his approach.
PUBLIC SECTOR STATISTICS FOR THE UNITED KINGDOM
Authors: Wells J. D. 
Published: March 2005

This paper describes the composition of the public sector in the United Kingdom and traces the development and contribution to the economy of the three main sub‐sectors‐central government, local government and public corporations—over the past thirty years. Relevant data for output, employment, fixed capital formation and national wealth set the public sector into perspective with the economy as a whole and illustrate how its share of human and other resources has changed over the years. While all four measures show the public sector share of the total to have been around 30 percent in 1980, historically the changes have moved very differently. The slow, but fairly steady, increase in the share of employment and output contrasts with very marked changes in the other two measures. Although public sector fixed investment nearly doubled in real terms between 1950 and 1980 its share of total investment declined from 48 to 31 percent, a much smaller share being taken by dwellings, electricity supply and the railways. In terms of the share of national wealth the public sector moved from a state of indebtedness to the rest of the economy in the fifties and sixties to a position of holding nearly one third of the value of tangible and financial assets in the late seventies.A small part of the paper considers the international dimension, but because few other countries use the concept of a public sector, this section examines only the relationship between total tax revenue and GDP in a number of countries and employment in general government.The problems of determining the boundary of the public and private sectors occurs most frequently at the interface between public corporations and private enterprises; the rules for deciding classification are set out in so far as they can be specified.The last sections of the paper put the statistics into their policy context and consider the value of public sector aggregates. The conclusion is that a general case cannot be made to justify assembling public sector aggregates for all countries; the need will be determined by the economic policies being pursued in a particular country. Although the United Kingdom gives considerable prominence to a public sector financial aggregate, the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement, the functions of the public corporations and the rest of the public sector are so disparate that consolidated accounts for the public sector are no longer prepared.
MEASUREMENT OF THE ROLE O F THE PUBLIC SECTOR IN THE FINNISH ECONOMY
Authors: Hjerppe Reino T. 
Published: March 2005

Following the growth of the public sector traditional measures of the size of the public sector have appeared to be inadequate for policy purposes. In the article the role of the public sector in the Finnish economy is described first by using some traditional methods and indicators. The historical background of the development is briefly discussed. After that some specific problems of the measurement are discussed. These problems include measurement of output and productivity, definition of appropriate balance of the public sector, different measures to describe the size and scope of the public sector, role of tax reliefs and subsidies, different organizational arrangements, public sector regulation etc.The growth of the public sector takes many different forms and it appears to be more difficult than formerly to obtain a comprehensive picture of the scope of the public sector. For different purposes different indicators have to be used. At the end of the paper the implications of the changing emphasis in the public policy are discussed.