Monthly economic indicators are used for a variety of purposes, from studying business cycles to determining economic policy and making informed business decisions. China’s published monthly industrial output statistics could hardly be more confusing, with changes in variables, in coverage, in...

Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz has criticized chain indices and Irving Fisher's time and factor reversal tests. However, his arguments (published in German articles) though well ahead of his time and still relevant today are widely fallen in oblivion. He was not the only German statistician who...

The New Stochastic Approach (NSA) – unjustly – pretends to promote a better understanding of price index (PI) formulas by viewing them as regression coefficients. As prices in the NSA are assumed to be collected in a random sample (what is particularly at odds with official price...

While credit cards provide transaction services, as do currency and demand deposits, credit cards have never been included in measures of the money supply. The reason is accounting conventions, which do not permit adding liabilities, such as credit card balances, to assets, such as money. But...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

The unit value index (UVI) as compiled in Germany for exports and imports is compared with two other indices, viz. an index of Drobisch which unfortunately is likewise known as "unit value index" and the "normal" Laspeyres price index (PI) of exports and imports. The UVI may be viewed as a...

This article presents the results of an investigation about the profit rate of the Chilean economy, for the period 1986-2009, and its relations with other economic categories, from the Marxist political economy approach. The author constructs the series for the basic categories of the...

This work presents an estimation of the profit rate evolution in Argentina for the period 1910-2011, on the basis of five long time series: real machine fixed capital productivity (1874-2011), real and nominal fixed capital productivity (1910-2011), and real and nominal profit rate on fixed...

Abstract This paper compiles alternative estimates of underground economies in twenty five transition countries during the transition decade and finds a disturbing lack of convergence between them, calling into question the reliability of GDP figures (which in varying degrees now include...

The hypothesis is that Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency have an aspect of sustainability in relation to inequality. The analysis finds efficient situations reached increasing inequality as diminishing in the long term effective demand in a larger measure than counterbalancing increases thanks...