Accurate and timely information on the current state of economic activity is an important requirement for the policymaking process. Delays in the publication of official statistics mean that a complete picture of economic developments within a particular period emerges only some time after that...

This paper examines the role of structural indicators in the process of multilateral surveillance of structural policies. An analytical framework is suggested that is based on welfare economics and which focuses on efficiency considerations. Potential indicators are examined for six areas --...

This paper presents the methodology adopted by the Economics Department to calculate indices of effective exchange rates and indicators of competitiveness, based on unit labour costs and export unit values in the manufacturing sector. The calculation derives from a double-weighting system which...

During the past decade, the formulation of fiscal policy has been increasingly founded on medium-term considerations associated with public debt and economic efficiency. In this regard, this paper, and the ones by Olivier Blanchard and Edward Gramlich in the same Working Paper Series, considers...

This paper examines the usefulness of consumer and business surveys in assessing the cyclical position of the economy and for forecasting output movements. To that effect, after a brief review of the nature of sentiment measures, the empirical relationship between confidence indicators and...

Clean air, clean water, fewer toxic emissions and less household waste are among the key environmental policy objectives that most OECD governments have been pursuing over the past three decades. This effort to take more account of the environmental costs of economic growth has been pursued in a...

This paper assesses if GDP per capita is an adequate proxy as a measure of wellbeing or whether other indicators are more suitable for this purpose. Within the national accounts framework, other better measures of economic resources exist, but they are closely correlated with GDP per capita and...

In this working paper, we decompose fiscal policy in three components: i) responsiveness, ii) persistence and iii) discretion. Using a sample of 132 countries, our results point out that fiscal policy tends to be more persistent than responding to output variations. We also found that while the...