This paper shows that we can use social media data to improve the accuracy of GDP estimates at the country level for developing countries. I use all publicly available image tweets from 2012 and 2013 ...to estimate GDP at the country level for developing countries. First, I find that one can explain 76% of the cross-country variation in GDP with the volume of tweets sent from each country. I then show that the residuals on these Twitter-GDP estimates are significantly larger for countries with allegedly poor data quality. I then use Nigeria as a case study to show that this method delivers much more timely and accurate estimates than those presented by official statistic agencies.
Coral reefs can provide significant coastal protection benefits to people and property. Here we show that the annual expected damages from flooding would double, and costs from frequent storms would ...triple without reefs. For 100-year storm events, flood damages would increase by 91% to $US 272 billion without reefs. The countries with the most to gain from reef management are Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico, and Cuba; annual expected flood savings exceed $400 M for each of these nations. Sea-level rise will increase flood risk, but substantial impacts could happen from reef loss alone without better near-term management. We provide a global, process-based valuation of an ecosystem service across an entire marine biome at (sub)national levels. These spatially explicit benefits inform critical risk and environmental management decisions, and the expected benefits can be directly considered by governments (e.g., national accounts, recovery plans) and businesses (e.g., insurance).
A concern with the mitigation of climate change cuts a transversal line across economic agents, epitomized by two contradictory viewpoints. Some defend that green growth can be achieved without ...harming economic growth; others argue that it is not possible to respect sustainability if intensive consumption of goods continues to foster economic growth. Our research aims to analyze the role that sustainable technology transfer and sustainable innovations play in green growth and ascertain the impact of green growth on economic growth. We use aggregated country‐level data provided by the OECD, including national accounts, population, and environment statistics (including patents) between 1990 and 2013 for 32 countries, corresponding to an unbalanced panel of 591 observations. We estimate econometric models based on dynamic panel methodologies to capture differences that exist over time. The results show that sustainable technology transfer and sustainable innovation promote green growth, which in turn positively impacts economic growth. We contribute new insight to the green growth versus economic growth debate and provide several political and management implications.
A Good War for Economic Growth? Pernica, Bohuslav; Sixta, Jaroslav
The Journal of Slavic military studies,
04/03/2023, Volume:
36, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
With the implementation of the UN's System of National Accounts 2008 (SNA 2008), an unusual impact of wars on economic growth emerged. The SNA 2008 enables nations to include the depreciation of ...military hardware in their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) calculations. Economic growth can be furthered not only by making extensive military investments in force modernization but donations of weapons and ammunition can also be factored into a nation's national accounts. This research note presents how the SNA has affected the Czech Republic, a member of both the EU and NATO, which is a small-sized country that since 2022 has donated an extraordinary volume of second-hand hardware to Ukraine, which has contributed to the economic growth of Ukraine.
Progress in natural capital accounting for ecosystems Hein, Lars; Bagstad, Kenneth J; Obst, Carl ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
2020-Jan-31, 2020-01-31, 20200131, Volume:
367, Issue:
6477
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Global statistical standards are being developed
Reversing the ongoing degradation of the planet's ecosystems requires timely and detailed monitoring of ecosystem change and uses. Yet, the System of ...National Accounts (SNA), first developed in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s and used by statistical offices worldwide to record economic activity (for example, production, consumption, and asset accumulation), does not make explicit either inputs from the environment to the economy or the cost of environmental degradation ( 1 , 2 ). Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (EEA), part of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), has been developed to monitor and report on ecosystem change and use, using the same accounting approach, concepts, and classifications as the SNA ( 3 ). The EEA is part of the statistical community's response to move SNA measurement “beyond gross domestic product (GDP).” With the first generation of ecosystem accounts now published in 24 countries, and with a push to finalize a United Nations (UN) statistical standard for ecosystem accounting by 2021, we highlight key advances, challenges, and opportunities.
The share of renewable energies has to increase significantly in the ongoing energy transition. Such a shift in production technology is expected to have noticeable effects on the energy sector’s ...input structure that is required for its output. This study examines how changes in a country’s energy mix affect its energy sector’s input coefficients within an input–output framework, using Austria’s renewable expansion act as a case study. Predicting input coefficients can be time-consuming and often relies on trends in past data. Our empirical approach is based on a fractional econometric model using panel data on the energy mix and input structures of energy sectors for 26 European countries, and can be efficiently and readily applied to the 26 countries covered in the model. We illustrate the prediction of input coefficients for Austria’s energy sector in 2030. We find that input shares from the energy sector to itself would remain high, while mining inputs would decrease. Our model also predicts that increasing the share of renewable energy sources comes with a significant decrease in the share of labor inputs, mainly because operating renewable energy technologies requires less labor than operating non-renewable ones. The presented method allows to assess renewable energy policy plans to anticipate the effects of structural changes in national energy sectors.
•A novel approach for modeling the energy sector’s input coefficients is presented.•Input coefficients are explained by the energy mix in a fractional multinomial logit (FMNL) model.•The effects of Austria’s renewable energy expansion act are analyzed in a case study.•An increase in renewable sources reduces the labor share and inputs from mining.•The approach is readily applicable for 26 European countries.
Payments systems generate vast amounts of naturally occurring transaction data rarely used for constructing official statistics. We consider billions of transactions from card data from a large bank, ...Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, as an alternative source of information for measuring consumption. We show, via validation against official consumption measures, that transaction data complements national accounts and consumption surveys. We then analyse the impact of COVID-19 in Spain, and document: (i) strong consumption responses to business closures, but smaller effects for capacity restrictions; (ii) a steeper decline in spending in rich neighbourhoods; (iii) higher mobility for residents of lower-income neighbourhoods, correlating with increased disease incidence.
•System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) amplifies analytical power of computable general equilibrium models.•Results of simulations run without integration of natural capital into The ...System of National Accounts are more positive.•Failure to include natural capital in national accounting leads to erroneous calculation of macroeconomic estimates.
Building on the current international discourse and United Nation's System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) this study provides further empirical evidences on how failure to include natural capital resources in national accounting leads to erroneous calculation of macroeconomic estimates. The SEEA methodological framework for integrating natural capital into the System of National Accounts amplifies analytical power of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models and allows to investigate relationship between the economy and the environment. This paper integrates values of natural capital into Supply and Use Tables (SUTs) to illustrate depletion of forest due to natural disaster. It further applies CGE model to demonstrate economy-wide effects of a real event in which hurricane felled almost 80 thousands hectares of trees in Polish forests in 2017. The model results corresponds with the statistical data published after the mentioned event. Furthermore they align with findings of previous studies, which applied different methodical approach and show that without natural capital accounting the macroeconomic estimates provide misleading information about economic performance.
This article describes the construction of the World Input-Output Tables (WIOTs) that constitute the core of the World Input-Output Database. WIOTs are available for the period 1995-2009 and give the ...values of transactions among 35 industries in 40 countries plus the 'Rest of the World' and from these industries to households, governments and users of capital goods in the same set of countries. The article describes how information from the National Accounts, Supply and Use Tables and International Trade Statistics have been harmonized, reconciled and used for estimation procedures to arrive at a consistent time series of WIOTs.
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