Survey_BU_2008

Abstract

We are dealing with national-accounts data for 42 countries. This sample is the universe of countries that seem to be promising for constructing reasonably accurate annual data since before World War I. The current study focuses on the countries for which we have, thus far, assembled annual data from before 1914 to 2006 on real per capita personal consumer expenditure, C (22 countries), and real per capita GDP (35 countries).1 Henceforth, we sometimes refer to C as “consumption.” Most of our analysis uses growth rates of C and GDP and does not involve comparisons of levels across countries. Therefore, for most purposes, we can use indexes of C and GDP, for example, setting the values of both variables to 100 for each country in 2000. However, the level comparisons matter for the construction of measures of C and GDP for groups of countries, such as the total of the OECD. To facilitate this analysis (and to allow for other uses of the data that depend on comparability of levels across countries), we set the level of per capita GDP for each country in 2000 to the PPPadjusted value in 2000 international dollars given in the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI). For per capita consumer expenditure, we set the level for each country in 2000 to the value given by the WDI for PPP-adjusted per capita GDP multiplied by the share of nominal personal consumer expenditure in the country’s nominal GDP.