The Conference Board

About: The Conference Board is a nonprofit organization based out in New York, New York, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Productivity & Investment (macroeconomics). The organization has 77 authors who have published 199 publications receiving 9052 citations. The organization is also known as: National Industrial Conference Board.

Intangible capital and u.s. economic growth

Abstract: Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more than $3 trillion of business intangible capital stock. To assess the importance of this omission, we add intangible capital to the standard sources-of-growth framework used by the BLS, and find that the inclusion of our list of intangible assets makes a significant difference in the observed patterns of U.S. economic growth. The rate of change of output per worker increases more rapidly when intangibles are counted as capital, and capital deepening becomes the unambiguously dominant source of growth in labor productivity. The role of multifactor productivity is correspondingly diminished, and labor's income share is found to have decreased significantly over the last 50 years.

World Trade Flows: 1962-2000

Abstract: We document a set of bilateral trade data by commodity for 1962-2000, which is available from www.nber.org/data (International Trade Data, NBER-UN world trade data). Users must agree not to resell or distribute the data for 1984-2000. The data are organized by the 4-digit Standard International Trade Classification, revision 2, with country codes similar to the United Nations classification. This dataset updates the Statistics Canada World Trade Database as described in Feenstra, Lipsey, and Bowen (1997), which was available for years 1970-1992. In that database, Statistics Canada had revised the United Nations trade data, mostly derived from the export side, to fit the Canadian trade classification and in some cases to add data not available from the export reports. In contrast, in the new NBER-UN dataset we give primacy to the trade flows reported by the importing country, whenever they are available, assuming that these are more accurate than reports by the exporters. If the importer report is not available for a country-pair, however, then the corresponding exporter report is used instead. Corrections and additions are made to the United Nations data for trade flows to and from the United States, exports from Hong Kong and China, and imports into many other countries.

The productivity gap between Europe and the United States : Trends and causes

Abstract: The benefits of the modern knowledge economy differ greatly between advanced economies. Average annual labor productivity growth (measured as GDP per hour of work) in the United States accelerated from 1.2 percent in the 1973–1995 period to 2.3 percent from 1995 to 2006. Conversely, the 15 European Union countries that constituted the union up to 2004 experienced a productivity growth slowdown between these two time periods. For these 15 countries as a group, labor productivity growth declined from an annual rate of 2.4 percent during the period 1973–1995 to 1.5 percent during the period 1995– 2006. While differences in the timing of business cycles in the United States and the European Union may have some effect on this comparison, they do not explain these divergent trend growth rates. This paper shows that the European productivity slowdown is attributable to the slower emergence of the knowledge economy in Europe compared to the United States. We consider various explanations which are not mutually exclusive: for example, lower growth contributions from investment in information and communication technology in Europe, the relatively small share of technologyproducing industries in Europe, and slower multifactor productivity growth (which can be viewed as a proxy for advances in technology and innovation). Underlying

Measuring Capital and Technology: An Expanded Framework

Abstract: Business outlays on intangible assets are usually expensed in economic and financial accounts Following Hulten (1979), this paper develops an intertemporal framework for measuring capital in which consumer utility maximization governs the expenditures that are current consumption versus those that are capital investment This framework suggests that any business outlay that is intended to increase future rather than current consumption should be treated as capital investment Applying this principle to newly developed estimates of business spending on intangibles, we find that, by about the mid-1990s, business investment in intangible capital was as large as business investment in traditional, tangible capital Relative to official measures, our framework portrays the US economy as having had higher gross private saving and, under plausible assumptions, fractionally higher average annual rates of change in real output and labor productivity from 1995 to 2002

Intangible Capital and Economic Growth

Abstract: Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more than $3 trillion of business intangible capital stock. To assess the importance of this omission, we add intangible capital to the standard sources-of-growth framework used by the BLS, and find that the inclusion of our list of intangible assets makes a significant difference in the observed patterns of U.S. economic growth. The rate of change of output per worker increases more rapidly when intangibles are counted as capital, and capital deepening becomes the unambiguously dominant source of growth in labor productivity. The role of multifactor productivity is correspondingly diminished, and labor's income share is found to have decreased significantly over the last 50 years.