Continuing Research on International Comparisons of Outputs and Prices

9321471赫斯顿这笔赠款为发展一个真实的国民核算体系提供持续的支助，该体系扩大了每个国家的国民核算体系，使之能够进行跨空间和跨时间的比较。 这一制度的数据是在联合国主持下通过基准研究收集的，在基准研究中收集了许多国家相同具体货物的价格。 基准研究始于1970年，每五年进行一次。 到目前为止，所获得的基准结果虽然对研究个别基准年很有价值，但对跨期分析来说，根本不能令人满意。 该项目的贡献来自三个方面。 首先，由于25年来基准研究的方法不同，以及基本国民账户的重大修订，本项目必须在统一程序、类别标题和国民账户投入方面重新制定最初的基准研究，使其具有直接可比性。 此外，该项目还监测原始基准支出和价格数据，以发现不合理的数字。 沿着监测工作，调查人员积极促进基准方法的制定。 第二，由于基准只涉及选定的年份和国家，因此需要有关基准未涉及的国家和年份的资料。 研究人员对基准横截面数据进行推断，以获得一个涵盖150多个国家的扩展列表和35年以上的长时间跨度的表格。 由此产生的非常大的国际可比数据集，称为宾夕法尼亚世界表（PWT），包含不太详细的信息，但提供了更完整的全球覆盖范围的长期序列。 第三，该项目估计了未列入常规国民账户数据集的重要分析变量。 这些指标包括资本存量、真实的研究开发估算值、国防支出、服务与商品、可贸易品与不可贸易品的产量估算值。

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.