Government agencies produce indexes that purport to measure international competitiveness. The most common version is the real effective exchange rate, which is some form of weighted average of the real exchange rates of the country's trading partners. Such indexes convey a false sense of...

Growth in the world economy is not shared equally among all countries, with some growing faster, some slower and some not at all. The cross-country distribution of growth is a useful tool for analysing the inequality of growth. The appropriately-weighted first moment of this distribution is...