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A Statistician’s Ordeal: The Case of Andreas Georgiou
by Miranda Xafa
For the past eight years Andreas Georgiou has been facing prosecution for the way he discharged his duties while he was president of Greece’s statistical agency (ELSTAT) in 2010-15. His detractors claim that Greece was forced to face harsher conditionality because the deficit was revised upwards, thus helping to justify externally imposed austerity. Despite overwhelming evidence that Mr. Georgiou correctly applied EU rules in revising Greece’s fiscal deficit and debt figures, and despite strong international support for his case, some Greek courts continued the witch hunt. The Georgiou case tested the independence of the Greek judiciary, as some senior prosecutors and judges would appear to have repeatedly failed to act in accordance with the rule of law and due process. With a solid majority in parliament, the newly-elected center-right New Democracy government has the opportunity to deliver deep institutional and economic reforms. Ensuring the independence of the judiciary should be a top priority. Read now


Call for Papers

World Economics would like submissions on key subjects of importance relating to the measurement of economic activity and data issues (for example, but not limited to):

Measuring output   Measuring price
  • GDP measures
  • Alternative measures of measuring economic activity
  • Measuring the gig economy
  • Measuring services and financial services output
  • Measuring government output
  • Measuring the shadow economy
  • Beyond GDP - depreciation of the environment, happiness
  
  • Measuring consumer price inflation
  • Estimating GDP and input price deflators
  • Measuring financial asset and real estate prices
  • Valuing 'free' services such as those offered by Google and Facebook
  • The price of light - how to measure the impact of rapid technological change on price


Measuring people   Debt
  • Measuring population numbers in developed countries
  • Measuring population in emerging markets
  • Population forecasting
  • Fertility estimation
  • Participation rates and unemployment
  
  • Defining debt
  • Measuring consumer debt
  • Measuring corporate debt
  • Measuring government debt
  • Debt cycles
  • Debt instruments


Submissions of articles for consideration by World Economics should be sent to editor@worldeconomics.com.

Additional Resources:
Guidelines and details for submissions
List of World Economics Editorial board members

Most Read
Data Manipulation of Inflation Statistics Artificially Raises Real GDP: The Case of China
Christopher Balding
Baseline Chinese economic data are unreliable. Taking published National Bureau of Statistics China data, three problems appear. First, base data on housing price inflation are manipulated. Second, the NBSC misclassifies most Chinese households as private housing ... More


On Measuring Hyperinflation: Venezuela’s Episode
Steve H. Hanke & Charles Bushnell
Venezuela now exhibits the 57th historic episode of hyperinflation as measured in the Hanke–Krus World Hyperinflation Table. Entry to the hyperinflation dataset depends on three qualifying criteria: inflation rates greater than 50% per month; the persistence of this ... More


How Accurate Are the National Balance Sheets for China?
James L. Chan
The accuracy of data on China’s national balance sheets has attracted much less attention than that of the Gross Domestic Product reports. China’s Bureau of National Statistics has not released official national balance sheets, but two Chinese research teams have ... More


Debt, Economic Growth and Data Adequacy
Vighneswara Swamy
The effects of government debt on economic growth has become of immense importance in the backdrop of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and Reinhart & Rogoff’s related research. This study is based on a sizeable dataset which extends the horizon of analysis to ... More


Poor Economic Statistics Fuel China’s Low Consumption Myth
Jun Zhang & Tian Zhu
The generally held belief that China’s consumption is too low is a myth based on inadequate theory, a misreading of official statistics and the use of market exchange rates for making international comparisons. Chinese official statistics underestimate consumption ... More

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Blogs

Death from Famine Declines Dramatically


The number of people dying from famine worldwide has fallen dramatically. Data available from the 1860s of the annual rate of people dying from famine globally per decade shows that after a spike of 142.2 per 100,000 people in the 1870s the rate fell to 14.9 per 100,000 by the 1910s, a fall correlated with the rise in global trade and economic convergence. The following decades witnessed wars, political turmoil, a fall in world trade and the imposition of communism in many countries resulting in an increase in the rate of deaths. But since the 1970s the rate has tumbled as the global economy has become more integrated and has averaged 0.5 per 100,000 between 2010 and 2016. These figures stand out more if consideration is made of the increase in world population that has taken place over the same time.

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Debt to GDP Ratio: Use with Care
One of the most widely used and misused statistics is the ratio of public debt to national income as a measure of a country’s solvency. The debt-to-GDP ratio itself is measured with a country's gross sovereign debt in the numerator and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the denominator...

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The Flaws in Population Data
Accurate world population data is immensely important in assessing the impact of people on the sustainability of the planet’s resources. According to World Economics there were an estimated 7.467 billion humans living on the planet in 2017...

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Serious Errors on UK Telecoms Data: Prices could have fallen by 90% more than the official price index
The Office of National Statistics (ONS), Britain’s official data agency, has admitted that it has made serious errors in its estimation of the output and productivity of the telecoms sector. A paper co-authored by Richard Heys, deputy chief economist of the ONS which compared approaches to deflating the output of the telecoms industry across countries found ...

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Trade Data: Use with Care
The international trade statistics used by many commentators are inaccurate and the way trade is measured is no longer fit for purpose. Not only do world exports and imports not balance, but large asymmetries are found in the balance of trade statistics between countries and regions. These errors do not cancel out on aggregation across countries...

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The UK Retail Price Index: Broken, Inaccurate and Unfair
Calculating price indexes that are theoretically sound, robust, comprehensive, easy to understand, and which reflect underlying reality is one of the hardest tasks in economics. Most measures of domestic inflation have flaws, but perhaps the least fit for purpose is the Retail Price Index (RPI) used in Britain.

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Can Big Data Improve Economic Measurement?
The amount of data generated and stored in the digital age is accelerating rapidly, but this is not reflected in official economic statistics. Half a decade ago one estimate put the daily global creation of data at around 2.5 exabytes [2.5×1018 bytes] and it was predicted last year that this would rise to...

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