The aim of this paper is to evaluate the changing impact of corporatism - cooperation between business, labour and state interest groups - over the period 1960-2010 and across industrialised economies on the development of the share of labour in national income. Also due to data issues this...

Existence of relationships between consumption viewed from quantitative as well as qualitative standpoint and level of economic development seems obvious. However, both food perception and food choices depend not only on the level of economic development, but they are also driven by innovative...

This paper estimates a three-frequency dynamic factor model for nowcasting Canadian provincial gross domestic product (GDP). Canadian provincial GDP is released by Statistics Canada on an annual basis only, with a significant lag (11 months). This necessitates a mixedfrequency approach that can...

Contradicting the conventional wisdom of constant factor shares, the portion of national income accruing to labor has been trending downward in the last three decades. This decline must have contributed to rising inequality as labor income is more evenly distributed than capital income. This...

We evaluate the usefulness of satellite-based data on nighttime lights for the prediction of annual GDP growth across a global sample of countries. Going beyond traditional measures of luminosity, such as the sum of lights within a country's borders, we propose several innovative distribution-...

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the key indicator of the health of an economy and can be easily compared across countries. But it has limitations. GDP tells what is going on today, but does not inform about sustainability of growth. It does not measure happiness, so residents can be dissatisfied...

The secular decline in safe interest rates since the early 1980s has been the subject of considerable attention. In this short paper, we argue that it is important to consider the evolution of safe real rates in conjunction with three other first-order macroeconomic stylized facts: the relative...

A utilitarian measure of economic growth combines changes in the distribution of income with changes in real income per person to show how much better off people are becoming over time. It is the rate of growth of the dollar value of average utility of income. As such , it is seen differently by...

This study is a first contribution to prioritization across productivity determinant capabilities that attempts to obtain the equivalent of a "shadow price" for each of these capabilities by estimating their impact on the success a country may have in reaching higher income per capita groups....

South Africa is estimated to allocate approximately US $12 billion for the 2014/15 fiscal year for social grants (Bhorat and Cassim, 2014). With an extensive coverage and budget, it is one of the most progressive social security schemes among low and even middle income countries. It helps...

Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...

Divergence between the evolution of GDP per capita and the income of a ‘typical’ household as measured in household surveys is giving rise to a range of serious concerns, especially in the USA. This paper investigates the extent of that divergence and the factors that contribute to it across...

In this paper we try to understand whether national accounts GDP per capita or survey mean income or consumption better proxy for true income per capita. We propose a data-driven method to assess the relative quality of GDP per capita versus survey means by comparing the evolution of each series...

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the development in income distribution and outlines its major long-term trends of 23 countries worldwide. These countries are clustered in four groups covering the core advanced, the Nordic, the emerging, and the least developed economies of the...

We examine economic activity in a large virtual economy which was designed to allow decentralized barter as the sole exchange institution. We find that a small subset of goods emerges endogenously which act of media of exchange. Our analysis includes estimation of spot exchange rates between...

We tackle the nowcasting problem at the regional level using a large set of indicators (regional, national and international) for the years 1998 to 2013. We explicitly use the ragged-edge data structure and consider the different information sets faced by a regional forecaster within each...

Income taxation may affect the regional allocation of population when prices vary over space. Our contribution is to compare different income tax systems in a migration equilibrium model for Norway using improved measure of regional wage differences. We apply register data of individual wages...