Most measures of economic performance used by government officials to inform their policies and decisions are based on gross-domestic-product figures. But concerns have long been raised that GDP-based ...

Paul Allin is a member of the UK National Statistician's Expert User Advisory Committee and he is the Royal Statistical Society's Honorary Officer for National Statistics. Views expressed in this ...

This Economic Letter discusses a topic that at first glance appears to be boring and technical but that in fact turns out to be quite important: the proper interpretation of chain-weighted data. To ...

What’s the best way to gauge the health of the economy? Gross domestic product, a measurement that calculates the value of all goods and services produced, has long been a good way to take the ...

French president Nicolas Sarkozy drew heat last month when he suggested that countries should factor happiness into their statistics for growth. After all, Sarkozy campaigned on promises of wealth ...

GDP growth is up. Time to celebrate! Then GDP growth is down again. Time to panic? These gyrations aren’t uncommon, and we have just been through one. A few weeks ago, President Biden boasted about ...

This last piece in a 5-article series, adapted from a speech I gave at a BritishAmerican Business virtual conference in September, suggests that while GDP has served a useful purpose in terms of ...

I discuss the importance of understanding where the economy is in the business cycle for investors, highlighting the difficulty in predicting recessions. I suggest that GDPplus, a model introduced by ...

Like other facets of the federal bureaucracy, government-collected data could soon bear the imprints of the Trump administration. The change would likely prove costly for banks and other businesses.

As an emerging research area, application of satellite-based nighttime lights data in the social sciences has increased rapidly in recent years. This study, building on the recent surge in the use of ...