Dollar market exchange rates are erroneously used by many publications to make cross-country comparisons of GDP. Exchange rates underestimate the relative size of developing economies and provide misleading estimates of important economic ratios such as energy intensity figures. The United Nations System of National Accounts recommend the use of Purchasing Power Parity converters which account for cross-country differences in price levels.

Angus Maddison died last April. As can be seen on his website, he left an impressive legacy of books, articles and tables of key figures. For many, his single most notable and distinctive contribution is the set of tables entitled Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1–2008 AD. This comprehensive and widely used database is uniquely rich, accessible and convenient to use: no other source in the world compares with it. This article argues the case for continuing and building on Maddison’s work through a wide-ranging cooperative scholarly programme. Ideally, such a programme would embody two related features. First, it would cover both the historical dimension and continuing developments in the world economy: the Maddison series would remain topical, as well as an ongoing contribution to quantitative economic history. Second, the programme would involve not only non-official experts, in universities and research institutes, but also national and international statistical agencies. Two immediate tasks are (1) extending the Maddison series to 2009 and (in due course) later years, and (2) inquiring into the differences that have emerged between some of Maddison’s estimates, in particular for China, and the counterpart figures put out by the leading international agencies.

This paper presents a critique of the characteristic treatment by economists of climate science, which appears as over-presumptive and uncritical. While the paper draws on a range of illustrative cases, the main focus is on six recent and important contributions. The present author argues that the authors and sources concerned, along with a good many others not quoted, have accepted too uncritically the received view as to the current significance of anthropogenic global warming and its possible dangers. They have placed undue trust in the official advisory process that governments have created and rely on, and disregarded evidence that puts that process in question. Hence there is a missing dimension in their treatment of policy aspects: they have not caught on to the need to strengthen the basis of policy by making the advisory process more objective and professionally watertight.

Two leading international agencies, the OECD and the IMF, are now becoming more closely involved with climate change issues, in conjunction with finance and economics ministries within their member countries. This broader official involvement opens up an opportunity: it could lead to a more informed and less presumptive treatment of the issues. At present, however, there is no sign that the opportunity will be perceived as such. In both the agencies and national capitals, it is taken for granted that ‘the science’ can be viewed as ‘settled’, and that the established advisory process which governments have created is objective and authoritative. For reasons set out here, this is not the right point of departure. A new framework is needed—less presumptive, more inclusive, more watertight professionally, and more attuned to the huge uncertainties that remain. Besides dealing with specifically economic aspects, work in both agencies should be directed more broadly to creating such a framework.

Governments, and in particular the governments of the OECD member countries, are mishandling climate change issues. Both the basis and the content of official policies are open to serious question. Too much reliance is placed on the established process of review and inquiry which is conducted through the agency of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This process, which is wrongly taken to be objective and authoritative, has been made the point of departure for over-presumptive conclusions which are biased towards alarm, in the mistaken belief that ‘the science’ is ‘settled’. Rather than pursuing as a matter of urgency ambitious and costly targets for drastic further curbing of CO2 emissions, governments should take prompt steps to ensure that they and their citizens are more fully and more objectively informed and advised. This implies both improving the IPCC process and going beyond it. As to the content of policy, it is not the case that the choice now lies between two extremes, of no action and the immediate adoption of much stronger measures to curb emissions. The orientation of policies should be made more evolutionary and less presumptive, with actual policy measures focusing more on carbon taxes rather than the present and prospective array of costly and intrusive regulatory initiatives.

The Stern Review, described as the most comprehensive review ever carried out on the economics of climate change, was published on 30 October 2006. The twin papers from a combined team of scientists and economists present a critique in two parts of the Stern Review. Part I focuses on scientific issues and their treatment in the Review. It forms the point of departure for Part II which deals with economic aspects. Each paper has its own list of authors. In relation to both scientific and economic issues, the authors question the accuracy and completeness of the Stern Review’s analysis and the objectivity of its treatment. They conclude that the Review fails to present an accurate picture of scientific understanding of climate change issues, and will reinforce ill-informed alarm about climate change. Two interrelated features of the Stern Review are that it greatly understates the extent of uncertainty as to possible developments, in highly complex systems that are not well understood, over a period of two centuries or more; and its treatment of sources and evidence is persistently selective and biased. These twin features have combined to make the Review a vehicle for speculative alarmism. In the judgement of the authors of the Dual Critique, the Stern Review mishandles data; gives too little attention to actual observation and evidence, as distinct from the results of model-based exercises; and takes no account of the failures of due disclosure, and the chronic limitations of peer reviewing, that have been characteristic of work relating to climate change which governments have commissioned and drawn on. As to specifically economic aspects, the authors note among other weaknesses that the Review systematically overstates projected costs of climate change, partly though by no means wholly as a result of its failure to acknowledge the scope for long-term adaptation to possible global warming; underestimates the likely cost—including to the world’s poor—of the drastic global mitigation programme that it calls for; and proposes worldwide adoption of a specially low rate of interest for discounting the costs and benefits of mitigation, on the basis of inadequate analysis and without regard for the problems and risks that would result. So far from being an authoritative guide to the economics of climate change, the Stern Review is deeply flawed. It does not provide a basis for informed and responsible policies.

When it comes to making international comparisons of real GDP, different views, conventions and practices are still in evidence. The authors set out the case for using purchasing power parity (PPP) converters for this purpose, rather than conversions based on exchange rates, and give reasons for rejecting various arguments that are still widely made to the contrary. In doing so, they provide instances of the differing current practices of international agencies, and argue the case for greater uniformity and consistency on their part. They make a number of suggestions, general and specific, for improving the quality and presentation of cross-country comparative data.

Three major studies of globalisation and its effects have recently been published. One of these is the report of an international commission of eminent persons. The other two are books by leading economists, one by Jagdish Bhagwati and the other by Martin Wolf. David Henderson comments on all these volumes, while placing the issues that they raise and discuss in the wider context of economic liberalisation in general and the attitudes and beliefs that bear on it.

Despite some searching and unanswered criticisms of its treatment of statistical evidence, the UNDP Human Development Report has become established as a widely-quoted and influential survey of the world scene. The 1999 Report, reviewed here, focuses on ‘globalization’. This is described as a dominant influence on the recent economic fortunes of developing countries in particular, and as a primary cause of continuing poverty and growing inequality in the world. The author argues that the Report provides neither argument nor evidence in support of this thesis; that it takes no account of other factors that have strongly influenced economic performance; that its main prescription for the world, of reforms in ‘global governance’, is largely beside the point; and that its whole approach is crudely anti-liberal. The author concludes by placing the Report, as also the economists who have aligned themselves with it, in the wider context of anti-liberalism today.