ABSTRACT

What are the implications of changes in measurement standards of GDP for global convergence debates? What are the political economy implications? To answer the former question, we examine the changes in national accounting standards from the early 1990s. Revisions to the System of National Accounts (SNA) – the international standard for constructing GDP – include several major changes to how production is measured, including the reclassification of financial intermediation services, R&D, and weapons systems as productive activities – all areas in which countries in the West has had an advantage in recent decades. In addition, there has been an increase in the proportion of imputations in the 1993 and 2008 revisions, which privileges the economic structures of the West. Overall, we find that these changes have had the effect of boosting the GDP of the West relative to the rest of the world and thus to an underestimation of global convergence compared to previous measures of GDP. To answer the second question, the paper unpacks the political economy implications of national accounting standards favouring Western economies along several axes, including the impacts on voting shares in international institutions, domestic policy incentives and epistemological debates about sustainable development.

摘要

GDP 衡量标准的变化对全球趋同辩论有何影响？政治经济学的含义是什么？为了回答前一个问题，我们考察了 1990 年代初期以来国家会计准则的变化。国民账户体系 (SNA)——构建 GDP 的国际标准——的修订包括对生产衡量方式的几项重大变化，包括将金融中介服务、研发和武器系统重新归类为生产活动——各国在所有领域近几十年来，在西方具有优势。此外，在 1993 年和 2008 年的修订中，估算的比例有所增加，这使西方的经济结构享有特权。总体，我们发现，这些变化具有提高西方相对于世界其他地区的 GDP 的效果，因此与之前的 GDP 衡量标准相比，低估了全球趋同。为了回答第二个问题，本文从几个方面剖析了有利于西方经济体的国家会计准则对政治经济的影响，包括对国际机构投票份额的影响、国内政策激励和关于可持续发展的认识论辩论。