An oasis of prosperity: solely an American phenomenon?
While economies worldwide falter, the United States remains steadfast. How did our nation get to be the land of milk and honey?
The accuracy of the BLS productivity measures
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has made sustained efforts to improve its productivity measures. The goals of these efforts have been to enhance the reliability of the measures; to facilitate analysis of economic performance; and to provide useful information to the public. 1 The BLS clearly recognizes that, despite the beneficial results of its program, there is room for further improvement. In the past several years, some have voiced concerns about the accuracy of the trends in the BLS productivity series, mainly to suggest that productivity growth for the business sector of the economy has been understated. The BLS has also been concerned about the accuracy of the major sector productivity trends and has devoted considerable effort to examining the accuracy of these trends. The concerns about possible underestimation of productivity growth have been focused on data for the business sector of the economy, and especially the services components of that sector. “Services,” broadly defined, include all producing activities outside the “goods” sector. The major services-producing activities are transportation, communications, utilities, retail and wholesale trade, finance and insurance, and various additional services rendered to persons and businesses. 2 Commentators have wondered why productivity in services has not grown nearly as rapidly as productivity in manufacturing, particularly in light of anecdotal indications of improvements in several types of services. Concerns have also been expressed about several measurement techniques used by the BLS to The accuracy of the BLS productivity measures
Functional Form Problems in Modeling Insurance and Gambling
Defining the outputs of the property insurance and gambling sectors of an economy has proved to be a difficult problem for national income accountants. It is well known that the traditional expected-utility model is not consistent with economic agents fully insuring their property. Thus the present paper adapts existing non-expected-utility theories to yield useful measures of output for the property insurance and gambling sectors.