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Effects of Terms of Trade Gains and Tariff Changes on the Measurement of U.S. Production Growth

出版	Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce, 2008
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=yQThtwEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Growth in productivity in the United States appears to have accelerated dramatically after 1995. In this paper, we argue that part of this apparent speed-up actually represents gains in the terms of trade and tariff reductions, especially for information-technology products. We demonstrate how unmeasured gains in the terms of trade and declines in tariffs can cause conventionally measured growth in real output and productivity to be overstated. Building on the GDP function approach of Diewert and Morrison, we develop methods for measuring these effects. During the late 1990s, the growth rates of our alternative price indexes for U.S. imports are as much as 2% per year lower than the growth rate of price indexes calculated using official methods, implying that unmeasured terms-of-trade gains can account for close to 0.2 percentage points per year, or about 20%, of the apparent increase in productivity growth for the U.S. economy. Bias in the price indexes used to deflate domestic output is a question beyond the scope of this paper, but if an upward bias were present in those indexes it would offset some of the effects of mismeasurement of gains in terms of trade.