Publications & documents

The measurement of non-market output, characterised by providing goods and services without economically significant prices, has always proved challenging for compilers of the National Accounts. Various approaches are available to meet these challenges, often resulting in slight differences in methodology between countries. Government policies, introduced in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic exacerbated some of these existing differences, potentially influencing the GDP estimates across countries. This joint paper by the United Kingdom Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) explains the methodological options available to statistical compilers and explores differences in methodologies used by countries to measure non-market output, analysing their implications for international comparisons of GDP growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper updates the OECD International Transport and Insurance Cost (ITIC) of Merchandise Trade database, which covers more than 180 countries and partners, and over 1000 products from 1995 to 2020. Transport and insurance costs, also known as CIF-FOB margins, are estimated using a gravity model. A cross-validation procedure is used to evaluate model performance. In addition to describing the methodology, the paper highlights that transport and insurance costs are declining as a fraction of trade value, but this reduction has been flattening out in more recent years. However, an alternative measure, the explicit CIF-FOB margins per kilogramme imported, suggests that transport and insurance costs have been actually rising since 2002. Both CIF-FOB margins and cost per kilogramme imported show increases in 2020 when compared to 2019. This is robust to corrections for compositional changes. The methodology is used to produce the International Transport and Insurance Costs of Merchandise Trade data base and the data is made publically available on .Stat under the International Trade and Balance of Payments heading.

In light of the need for detailed and timely internationally comparable trade price indices, this paper describes a multi-tiered methodology to mitigate many of the empirical challenges associated with using customs data, to provide more robust estimates of unit value indices (UVIs) by country and product. UVIs are available for both exports and imports, by reporting country and the CPA 2-digit level of classification. Although the approach cannot capture changes in the quality of products nor compositional changes happening at a lower than HS 6-digit classification, the results indicate that at higher levels of aggregation (SITC 1-digit level), estimated UVIs closely follow price changes obtained from other sources. This is observed both for products with significant and rapid quality changes, such as hi-tech products, and for products with a low rate of quality changes, such as commodities, other primary and low-tech goods. Furthermore, products where little quality change occurs over time show similarity between UVIs and price changes from other sources at lower levels of disaggregation. The methodology is used to produce the Merchandise Trade Price Index and the data is made publically available on .Stat under the International Trade and Balance of Payments heading.

Les petites et moyennes entreprises (PME) et les entrepreneurs ont été durement touchés pendant la crise du COVID-19. Les réponses politiques ont été rapides et sans précédent, aidant à amortir le choc et à maintenir la plupart des PME et des entrepreneurs à flot. Malgré l’ampleur du choc, les données disponibles jusqu’à présent indiquent une création soutenue de start-ups, aucune vague de faillites et une impulsion à l’innovation dans la plupart des pays de l’OCDE. Cependant, le soutien des gouvernements a été moins efficace pour les travailleurs autonomes, les petites et jeunes entreprises, les femmes et les entrepreneurs issus de minorités. Les pays n’ont pas non plus tous été en mesure de soutenir les PME. Alors que les campagnes de vaccination se déploient et que les perspectives économiques s’éclaircissent, les gouvernements doivent prendre le virage d’une sortie de crise et créer les conditions nécessaires pour reconstruire en mieux. Les Perspectives 2021 de l’OCDE pour les PME et l’entrepreneuriat apportent de nouvelles données probantes sur l’impact de la crise sur les PME et les entrepreneurs et les réponses politiques apportées. Elles réfléchissent à des questions à plus long terme, telles que l’endettement des PME ou le rôle des PME dans des chaînes d’approvisionnement plus résilientes, ou la diffusion de l’innovation. Le rapport contient des profils de pays qui comparent l’impact, les facteurs de vulnérabilité et les sources de résilience dans les pays de l’OCDE, et mettent l’accent sur le soutien à la liquidité et les plans de redressement pour les PME.

As data have become a social and economic resource, including for value creation, decision-making, innovation and production, policy makers are facing a number of challenges. Among the most important issues – but also one that is particularly complex – is how to measure the economic value of data to provide a solid evidence base for policymaking. This Going Digital Toolkit note brings clarity about what is meant by the term 'data' in the context of efforts to conceptualise and measure the value of data from a statistical perspective. The note also highlights why estimating the value of data is increasingly important, identifies the conceptual and practical measurement challenges faced, and catalogues various innovative initiatives underway across countries in the context of the forthcoming revision of the System of National Accounts and beyond.

While indices tracing the evolutions of regional house prices are increasingly available, this is less the case for similar data on house price levels. And where data on house price levels exist, they are not necessarily consistent with the patterns observed from house price indices. Yet, consistent regional statistics on house price levels are fundamental to assess housing affordability, potential barriers to labour mobility across regions, and for the design of housing policies. This article puts forward a method to compile regional house price levels that are consistent with the evolutions given by quality-adjusted house price indices, representative of the underlying stock of dwellings, and based on the information on house price levels that is available at all dates rather than in a single reference year. This method could be scaled up to different countries. The results obtained with Spanish data show that the decline in house prices following the global financial crisis of 2008-09 initially reduced the dispersion in house prices across Spanish regions, but this dispersion has increased again afterwards, and since 2016, it exceeds the one recorded in 2008. A comparison of price-per-m² to regional-income ratios shows that the relative housing affordability in the region of Madrid deteriorated compared to all other Spanish regions in the last decade. Monitoring whether shifts in housing demand following the COVID-19 pandemic will reverse this trend will be key.

This paper explores the conceptual framing and measurement of transboundary impacts in the context of the 2030 Agenda. It starts by defining transboundary impacts and reviewing different measurement approaches used so far. It then proposes a typology of transboundary impacts, classified depending on the type of international flows involved: financial flows, trade flows, movements of people, environmental flows and knowledge transfers. For each of these flows, transboundary impacts can be either positive or negative, depending on the aspect considered and on the conditions in origin and destination countries. Based on this framework, the paper presents evidence from a qualitative survey of experts about the potential impact of these five flows on each of the 17 Goals and 169 targets of the 2030 Agenda. Transboundary impacts are deemed by experts to be quite pervasive across SDGs, but also limited in scope to a small number of well-identified targets. Finally, the framework is operationalised for some specific areas within each of the five types of flows mentioned above, with the help of some proxy indicators. At the global level, the five types of transboundary relationships are dominated by three macro-regions, namely China, the United States-Canada and Europe, mainly reflecting the large size of these regions in most cases. When the assessment is conducted in relative terms (i.e. when impacts are normalised by population size or GDP), the picture becomes more nuanced, as 7 out of the 11 world regions considered record at least two large transboundary impacts. While this operationalisation is only meant to show how the proposed framework could be applied to concrete cases, the paper recommends its applications to other areas within each of the five flows, based on a richer set of indicators.