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OECD Statistics Working Papers

The OECD Statistics Working Paper Series - managed by the OECD Statistics and Data Directorate – is designed to make available in a timely fashion and to a wider readership selected studies prepared by staff in the Secretariat or by outside consultants working on OECD projects. The papers included are of a technical, methodological or statistical policy nature and relate to statistical work relevant to the organisation. The Working Papers are generally available only in their original language - English or French - with a summary in the other.

Joint Working Papers:

Testing the evidence, how good are public sector responsiveness measures and how to improve them? (with OECD Public Governance Directorate)

Measuring Well-being and Progress in Countries at Different Stages of Development: Towards a More Universal Conceptual Framework (with OECD Development Centre)

Measuring and Assessing Job Quality: The OECD Job Quality Framework (with OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs)

Forecasting GDP during and after the Great Recession: A contest between small-scale bridge and large-scale dynamic factor models (with OECD Economics Directorate)

Decoupling of wages from productivity: Macro-level facts (with OECD Economics Directorate)

Which policies increase value for money in health care? (with OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs)

Compiling mineral and energy resource accounts according to the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) 2012 (with OECD Environment Directorate)

English

Measuring consumer inflation in a digital economy

The effect on the household consumption price index from possible sources of error in capturing digital products depends on the weight of the affected products. To calculate upper bounds for this effect, we apply weights based on the average structure of household consumption in OECD countries to a maximum plausible overstatement of price change for each affected or potentially affected product. The products account for about 35% of household expenditure in 2005, declining to 32% in 2015. The upper bound simulation effect on the growth rate of the consumption deflator is somewhat less than –0.6 percentage points in 2015 – large enough to improve the picture of GDP and productivity growth in advanced economies. However, this would not overturn the conclusion that productivity growth has slowed substantially compared over the past decades.

English

Keywords: productivity, digitalised economy, GDP growth, Inflation, digital replacements, cost of living index
JEL: E01: Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics / General / Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth; Environmental Accounts; C43: Mathematical and Quantitative Methods / Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics / Index Numbers and Aggregation; Leading Indicators; D60: Microeconomics / Welfare Economics / Welfare Economics: General; E31: Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics / Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles / Price Level; Inflation; Deflation; D11: Microeconomics / Household Behavior and Family Economics / Consumer Economics: Theory; O47: Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth / Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity / Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence
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