Official data show that the performance of Britain’s green economy, up to 2019 at least, has been decidedly anaemic. UKEF’s 2030 export target is unimpressive, but even so Britain’s green economy and international trade remain small. Measuring this sector is vital but statistical estimates of the evolving green economy represent work in progress, while Britain’s two official data sources are significantly inconsistent. These differences urgently need resolution. The EGSS database, which is more closely aligned with international standards, shows paltry responses to yawning skills gaps and concentration in low-growth/low-productivity activities. Britain post-Brexit, with an underperforming green economy, faces a long road ahead since the only sector effectively contributing to exports and jobs is electric vehicle production.

This study looks at the measurement of the extent, causes and consequences of deforestation as a depletion of a stock of natural capital, a topic of interest to national statistics offices (NSO) in the preparation of satellite accounts. Currently many anomalies and unresolved issues affect the construction of forest databases, although efforts are currently under way to resolve these data problems. Brazil and Indonesia account for 35% of global forest loss in the sample of countries studied in this paper between 1990 and 2015. This has called beef and palm oil to international attention, especially from environmental activists. The case of Malaysia, where consistent data show that reforestation has followed rising GDP per capita and strong policy on forest management, provides strong empirical support for Forest Transition Theory.

Over 80% of international trade is financed by some form of credit, but the size of the trade finance market has received little attention by economists. It has been estimated that there is currently a world trade finance gap of around US$1.5 trillion acting as a drag on international trade and GDP growth. Survey-based estimates of traditional trade finance provided by banks at US$4.6 trillion in 2017 are highly inconsistent and are based on flawed data and opaque methodologies. The problem of collecting reliable data needed to promote trade growth and to monitor financial stability is being exacerbated as the trade finance sector is undergoing rapid structural change.

Saudi Arabia’s Council of Ministers approved an ambitious National Transformation Programme (NTP) in June 2016 with the aim of carrying out a complete restructuring of the economy. The implementation of Vision 2030 has major implications for the structure of Saudi Arabia’s labour market with the creation of 1.2 million non-oil private sector jobs, most of which are expected to be taken up by citizens. Official data shows the labour market has a number of distinctive features which will challenge the implementation of Vision 2030: an overreliance on expatriate labour; a preference by nationals for public sector jobs; a gender imbalance; persisting structural unemployment and problems in balancing labour supply and demand. The government is attempting to change the operation and structure of the labour market by a set of policies involving quotas, subsidies, taxes, penalties and the provision of information services, but for a number of reasons change is unlikely to proceed smoothly in the next few years.

Until 2014 the only illegal activity measured in the UK National Accounts by the Office of National Statistics was the smuggling of alcohol and tobacco. The European System of National Accounts 2010 requires statistical bodies to measure consensual illegal economic activities such as drug consumption and prostitution. In 2014 the first estimates measured the contribution of illegal drugs and prostitution at 2009 prices to UK Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at just under £10 billion. The estimates are based on a flawed methodology using survey data while private sector figures suggest that the contribution of the cannabis market alone to GDP may be over three times the official value of £828 million .

The main conclusions of the theory of comparative advantage is powerful and inescapable – restrictions on trade harm economic welfare. The principle of comparative advantage shows that trade enables one-off welfare gains, but the impact of international trade on prosperity and on economic growth and development are empirical questions. The balance of evidence suggests that opening economies to trade is associated with higher growth, improved welfare, lower corruption and better working conditions. Restrictions on trade damage the development prospects of poorer countries which require assistance with infrastructure to enable them to realise the benefits from integration into the world economy.

Politicians focus on trade deficits and surpluses between countries and threaten trade wars and retaliatory actions, but the conventional international trade statistics used by many commentators are inaccurate. World exports and imports do not balance, but asymmetries are also found in the balance of trade statistics between countries and regions and these discrepancies can be very large in emerging markets. The ‘Rotterdam effect’ distorts the measurement of trade flows and balances where goods are recorded as imports into one country, which subsequently re-exports them to third countries without taking note of the country of origin. The Apple ‘Made in China’ question, or the existence of global value chains where much trade is in intermediate inputs, indicates that conventional trade statistics involve double-counting and misallocated trade balances.

The Asia-Pacific region is set to remain the world’s economic powerhouse in terms of economic growth for the next few decades. In value terms, Asian GDP increased between 1970 and 2015 from $4.63 trillion to $45.39 trillion in constant prices, an increase well above the rise in population growth, raising millions out of poverty. If current trends continue World Economics predicts that the share of the Asia-Pacific region in world GDP will have risen to 63.5% by 2050 with Europe declining to 12.1%, the Americas at 18.9% and Africa rising marginally to reach 5.5%. Slowing growth in China will not halt the Asian growth story as conditions for expansion exist across South Asia, particularly in India.

Increasingly, national income statisticians, the specialists involved in producing real national income figures, and the users of those figures are living in a parallel universe. Most countries use an outdated and inaccurate method to estimate real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by using what is termed single deflation. Best practice suggests using double deflation: one price index to deflate the prices of goods produced and another to deflate the value of intermediate goods used up in production. A recent study comparing single deflation calculations with double deflation official growth estimates for eight countries showed that, for some years, single deflation figures deviated up- or downwards from the official estimates by as much as 3–4 percentage points.

The methods used to estimate the contribution of financial services to national income are seriously flawed. Banking sector output in the UK was estimated to have increased in 2008 while the financial services sector was collapsing. The relative contribution of service activities in GDP is not easy to measure, but there are many problems in measuring financial services in general and the output of banks in particular. National income accounting standards, used to estimate the output of financial intermediation companies such as banks, rely on flawed indirect measurements based on interest rate spreads. Furthermore, many services are provided at no charge so price indexes cannot be meaningfully created. The main method used, Financial Intermediation Services Indirectly Measured (FISIM), is arbitrary and fails to measure the quality of banking assets and risk. Over the period 2003–7, one study found that aggregate risk-adjusted output would have been only 60% of officially estimated output across the Euro area.

The fact that corporate reputations deliver tangible shareholder value has been recognised by managers for some time. More recently, techniques have emerged that allow them to measure just how much value reputation delivers and identify the driving factors in order to structure communications and corporate messaging accordingly. While these techniques are having a marked affect on how companies are managing their reputation assets their use also has implications for investors. This paper uses reputation data to analyse the share price performance of companies identified as over- or under-valued. Evidence is found that where reputations are such that they suggest the companies are under-valued, that over time their market capitalizations grow at a greater rate than those whose reputations suggest over-valuation. This implies company reputation can be a powerful leading edge indicator to estimate investor returns and thus contribute to fund management.

The Asia-Pacific region covers the countries around the Pacific Rim, South East Asia, the Indian Sub-Continent and Oceania. It contains three of the world’s largest economies outside the US: China, India and Japan. The quality of economic statistics varies widely across the region mainly because of differences in the resources available to national statistical offices in the large number of poorer countries. There are other data problems affecting inter-country comparisons: the use of old standards of national income accounting; the degree to which shadow and informal economies are under-recorded; and the use of outdated base years for the calculation of real GDP. On top of these issues is the continuing question about the extent to which China’s economic data is subject to political manipulation.

This paper reviews the quality of official national accounting data investigated for 17 Latin American countries. Chile, which became an OECD member in 2010, stands out as a producer of the most reliable economic data and can be compared favourably with the USA and many European countries. The most significant data problems are the use of old standards of national income accounting, the use of outdated base years and the degree to which the shadow economy is underrecorded. In Argentina there is the additional problem that official published economic data has been subject to much interference in order to downplay inflation while reporting higher real national income and lower poverty data. A simple exercise is undertaken to estimate what the size of Latin American GDP might be if most countries updated their base years to 2012.

The United Kingdom is one of a few larger economies without a national wealth fund. This paper investigates the feasibility of a recent proposal to turn The Crown Estate, one of Britain’s largest property investment and management businesses, into such a Sovereign wealth fund as an alternative to its privatisation. The Crown Estate was created in 1760 by Parliament as a means of funding the British monarchy, but when the current Queen dies or abdicates there is likely to be a wide ranging debate about the type of monarchy Britain wants and how it is financed. However, with assets of just under US$12 billion The Crown Estate would be small in relation to other national funds. At present, with an estimated six trillion dollars, the global funds under Sovereign wealth management have been steadily increasing their significance in global investment. The largest single fund is the Norwegian Government Pension Fund with assets of circa US$803.9 billion, while greater China controls US$1.63 trillion through four separate funds. The authors argue that any British fund, even if formed out of The Crown Estate, should have access to the revenues from shale oil and gas which could be worth as much as £500 to £800 of GDP per head at 2012 prices.

Corporate reputations rank amongst companies’ most valuable assets. They are delivering substantial proportions of their market capitalisations and are a major source of value generation. Their significance is being felt in a wide variety of business sectors including real estate and in particular Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) where, as this paper demonstrates, they have become critical drivers of shareholder value as investors increasingly find the surveyor estimates of underlying asset values wanting. This is having significant implications on how, for example, REITs need to manage their corporate reputations and deploy the likes of reputation value analysis to ensure that the messaging they’re delivering is both securing and growing corporate value.

An introduction to World Economics 14.3 which focuses on the problems with Global Real Estate Data.

This paper reviews three investment models with a basis in economics which try to answer questions about the relative value of equity markets. Three basic approaches are critically analysed from the perspective of their broad conceptual underpinnings, the available evidence and their data requirements. These three are Professor Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price- Earnings Model (CAPE), Tobin’s q (QR) and the Equitisation Ratio (ER). The paper finds that although there still remains disagreement about the signals on relative market valuation given by the different valuation models, an analysis of the period 1952 to 2010 of their performance in relation to the S&P 500 index in the United States shows that the three measures move together very closely and, apart from a limited number of periods, all of them provide the same signal of an over- or undervalued index. However, all of the models have signalled periods of significant length when the stock market is relatively overvalued or undervalued, without any corrections in the value of the S&P 500. The length of these periods, despite the fundamental warnings given by these methods, can make a considerable difference to the return on any fund focused on short-run performance. This limits their use to investors more interested in the long-term.

There are very good grounds for challenging much of the conventionally accepted UN and World Bank economic data relating to both the absolute and relative per capita income of many African countries and to their growth rates over time. A recent paper by Morton Jerven published in World Economics demonstrated the unreliability of much if not most African GDP data and a new paper published in this issue by Deborah Potts challenges the accuracy of African population estimates"

The Central Statistics Office of the Government of India launched a new Consumer Price Index (CPI) which will start producing consumer price inflation estimates from January 2012. The creation of the new index is a delayed response to the findings of the National Statistical Commission which found deficiencies in the existing systems of price data collection and the compilation of indices. Until relatively recently there have only been piecemeal changes in the system of measuring inflation in India with the Reserve Bank of India and various government departments relying mainly on a Wholesale Price Index to shape policy. The emergence of volatile inflationary pressures in recent years have seen greater urgency in the process of revising the methods by which price indices are measured in India culminating in the discontinuation of some indices, major overhauls in the methods of construction of others and the launch of the new all India CPI. This paper will review the main price indices published in India highlighting some of their main statistical and economic strengths and weaknesses and will discuss both the proposed and the actual changes that have been made.

This paper looks at the recent problems in official Greek economic data on public finances, whose reliability has been impaired by inappropriate accounting methods, the application of poor statistical methods and deliberate misreporting. Data on deficits and debt have been misleading from before Greece’s eurozone entry, but despite a regular supply of public information about the problems, the rating agencies did not respond by downgrading Greek public debt until it was too late. These agencies reacted to, rather than leading, market tends that were already under way. The issue casts doubt on the fitness for purpose of the European Statistical System where the powers of Eurostat, the statistics arm of the European Commission have been inadequate to effectively monitor the fiscal status of eurozone countries. These powers, at present limited by the principle of subsidiarity to administering a Code of Practice, must be strengthened closer to approximating a power of audit.

Countries often compete fiercely for the right to host the football FIFA World Cup finals, but apart from national prestige, are there any concrete economic benefits to be gained from hosting sporting events such as the Olympics or the World Cup? The evidence is mixed. Many estimates suggest that large gains in employment and a boost to economic growth result. Some economists conclude that the net economic impact arising from a boost to aggregate demand is often negligible or even negative. This paper surveys a range of studies assessing the macroeconomic impact of hosting the finals. The authors argue that it is inappropriate to rely on measures of the economic impact that are concerned only with the effect on macroeconomic variables to decide whether a bid should be made or not, since hosting events can have major effects on the structures of the football market and related industries.