Continuing Research on International Comparisons of Outputs and Prices

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9321471 Heston This grant provides continued support for the development of a system of real national accounts that extends the national accounting system of each country to make possible comparisons across space as well as time. The data for this system is collected under the auspices of the United Nations through benchmark studies in which prices of identically specified goods are collected in many countries. The benchmark studies started in 1970 and are conducted in five year intervals. The benchmark results so far available, though valuable for studying individual benchmark years, are not at all satisfactory for intertemporal analysis. The contribution of this project comes in three areas. First, due to differences in method over the 25 years of benchmark studies as well as major revisions in the underlying national accounts, this project has to recast the original benchmark studies with respect to uniform procedures, category headings, and national accounts inputs to make them directly comparable. In addition, the project monitors the original benchmark expenditure and price data for unreasonable numbers. Along with the monitoring, the investigators have actively contributed to the development of benchmark methodology. Second, since the benchmarks cover only selective years and countries, there is a need for information about countries and years not covered in the benchmarks. The investigators extrapolate the benchmark cross-section data to obtain a table covering an expanded list of 150-odd countries and a long time span of 35-plus years. The resulting very large, internationally comparable data set, termed the Penn World Table (PWT), contains less detailed information but provides long time series with much more complete worldwide coverage. Third, the project estimates important analytical variables not included in the conventional national accounts data sets. These include the capital stock, estimates of real Research & Development, Defense expenditures, and estimates of output quantities of services vs. commodities and tradables vs. non-tradables.