Saturday, July 19, 2014

Penn World Tables


The "Notes" tab of FRED's Total Factor Productivity page has a "For more information" link to the research tab at Penn World Table (PWT).

The PWT page offers several tables, including a "Data" table. That table lists several measures of real GDP, but also DA and GA -- Development Accounting and Growth Accounting.

DA provides "the sources of differences in living standards at a point in time". That sounds interesting. The words "living standards" capture one's attention.

GA, Growth Accounting, provides "the sources of economic growth over time". Not too long ago I looked a bit at the Solow Growth Model. It's something I want to look at again. I clicked this one. Here's a piece of what I got:


Data goes back to 1950, that's decent. Several countries, okay. Capital stock values, yeah that's related to the Solow Growth Model, okay.

If they're so blunt as to present that particular set of nations (instead of maybe the G7 nations) they have to be bold enough to make it easy to change what shows up on the list. Yup: See that red dot in the upper left, just above the table? "Adjust criteria". You got it. There's a lot of countries to pick from, and more, and it's pretty intuitive. And the "adjust criteria" page has a red dot in the upper right, pointing right, that gets you back to the data table. Very nice.

Something I never saw on line before: In the table, in the header area, at the left, it says "Toggle display". I didn't try that one yet. But to the right of it there are four little arrows. Hover over the down-arrow and a tag says "Change order". Hover over the diagonal arrow and the tag says "Move to Y-axis". That, I never saw on line before.

I didn't play with the buttons. I adjusted the criteria to show only U.S. data. Because I'm focused. Or myopic, whatever. The previous table shows "Capital stock at constant 2005 national prices" for half a dozen countries. The following table shows "Capital stock" and four other "growth accounting"-related data categories:


If you need to see it bigger click the image, or just go to Penn World Tables.

I like the place already.

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