This paper summarizes assumptions made and results obtained in parts of the literature on welfare and sustainability accounting. I consider five different assumptions that can be imposed independently of each other, producing 32 different combinations. This taxonomy is used to organize results...

We develop a framework for analyzing national income accounting using a revealed welfare approach that is sufficiently general to cover, e.g., both the standard discounted utilitarian and maximin criteria as special cases. We show that the basic welfare properties of comprehensive national...

We consider the question of how to integrate carbon emissions in comprehensive national accounts for the purpose of indicating whether countries' development is sustainable. We derive an expression for national saving which includes not only the national effect of current global emissions, but...

The Hamilton method for estimating CPI bias is simple, intuitive, and has been widely adopted. We show that the method confiates CPI bias with variation in cost-of-living across income levels. Assuming a single price index across the income distribution is inconsistent with the downward sloping...

Investment statistics of the People's Republic of China are a source of many puzzles. Some investment data are of dubious quality, while the particular concepts of investment and their changing definitions over time are often poorly understood. Fixed asset investment, a remnant of the planned...

Accurate real-time macroeconomic data are essential for policy-making and economic nowcasting. In this paper, I introduce a real-time database for German regional economic accounts (READ-GER). The database contains real-time information for nine macroeconomic aggregates and the 16 German states....

We provide a comprehensive overview of the literature on the measurement of democracy and present an extensive update of the Machine Learning indicator of Gründler and Krieger (2016, European Journal of Political Economy). Four improvements are particularly notable: First, we produce a...

This paper does three things. First, based on a limited number of theoretically established dimensions, it proposes a new de facto indicator for the rule of law. It is the first such indicator to take the quality of legal norms explicitly into account. Second, using this indicator we shed new...

The present note raises the issue of how best to interpret the World Bank's (WB) much used "constant USD per capita income" concept and similar series. We find that the guide to its construction appearing on the WB data portal to be sketchy. The procedures essentially convert all host-country...

We review the aid effectiveness literature to assess whether foreign aid given to areas of limited statehood can be expected to promote economic and social outcomes in the recipient country. We distinguish different types of aid, motives for granting it, recipient country policies and...