Measuring Economic Growth and Productivity: Foundations, KLEMS Production Models, and Extensions

Measuring Economic Growth and Productivity: Foundations, KLEMS Production Models, and Extensions presents new insights into the causes, mechanisms and results of growth in national and regional accounts. It demonstrates the versatility and usefulness of the KLEMS databases, which generate internationally comparable industry-level data on outputs, inputs and productivity. By rethinking economic development beyond existing measurements, the book's contributors align the measurement of growth and productivity to contemporary global challenges, addressing the need for measurements as well as the Gross Domestic Product.

All contributors in this foundational volume are recognized experts in their fields, all inspired by the path-breaking research of Dale W. Jorgenson.

• Demonstrates how an approach based on sources of economic growth (KLEMS – capital, labor, energy, materials and services) can be used to analyze economic growth and productivity
• Includes examples covering the G7, E7, EU, Latin America, Norway, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, India and other South Asian countries
• Examines the effects of digital, information, communication and integrated technologies on national and regional economies

Barbara M. Fraumeni is Special-term Professor of the China Center for Human Capital and Labor Market Research of the Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China; Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, USA, IZA Research Fellow, Bonn, Germany and Professor Emerita of the Muskie School of Public Service of the University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME, USA. She has conducted research in the area of economic growth, productivity, and human and nonhuman capital. A long-time associate of Dale W. Jorgenson, the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University, she co-authored with him an early KLEM article in 1981, their three seminal articles on human and nonhuman capital in the late eighties and early nineties, also with him and Frank Gollop the book: "Productivity and U.S. Economic Growth" in 1987. In between academic appointments, she served as Chief Economist of the Bureau of Economic Analysis from 1999 to 2005. In that position she was awarded with others a U.S. Department of Commerce gold medal for capitalizing R&D in GDP. For the past 10 years, she has worked with Chinese researchers to produce estimates of human capital for China. Most recently, she served as a consultant to the World Bank to advise them in their construction of Jorgenson-Fraumeni human capital for 141 countries, which were released as part of their wealth estimates publication in early 2018.