Continuing Research on International Comparisons of Outputs and Prices

9321471赫斯顿这笔赠款继续支持发展一套实际国民核算制度，扩大各国的国民核算制度，以便进行跨空间和跨时间的比较。这一系统的数据是在联合国主持下通过基准研究收集的，其中在许多国家收集相同特定商品的价格。基准研究始于1970年，每五年进行一次。迄今为止的基准结果，虽然对研究个别基准年份很有价值，但对跨期分析却一点也不令人满意。这个项目的贡献来自三个方面。首先，由于25年来基准研究方法的差异以及基础国民核算的重大修订，本项目必须在统一程序、类别标题和国民核算投入方面重新设计原来的基准研究，以使它们具有直接可比性。此外，本项目还对原始基准支出和价格数据进行了监测，发现不合理的数字。在监测的同时，调查人员还积极地为基准方法的发展做出了贡献。第二，由于基准只涵盖有选择性的年份和国家，因此需要提供基准未涵盖的国家和年份的信息。调查人员对基准横截面数据进行了推断，得出了一个涵盖150多个国家的扩展列表，涵盖了35年多的时间跨度。由此产生的非常大的、国际上可比较的数据集，称为佩恩世界表（PWT），包含的详细信息较少，但提供了较长的时间序列，覆盖范围更完整。第三，该项目估计了传统国民核算数据集中未包括的重要分析变量。这些数据包括资本存量、对实际研发、国防开支的估计，以及对服务与商品、可贸易商品与不可贸易商品的产出数量的估计。

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.