Telecoms Deflators: A Story of Volume and Revenue Weights

Abstract

We draw up an inventory of entitlements related to social benefits and social support available locally to beneficiaries of the Revenu de Solidarité Active (RSA, the current scheme of minimum income) in 20 French cities, including Paris, Lyon and Marseille. We then compare the social scales inventoried in 2020 to those collected in 2001 and 2007, i.e. prior to the switch from the previous minimum income scheme (RMI) to the RSA. We show an overall shift towards more degressive conditions for granting support. In all the cities covered and for all family configurations, threshold effects have become limited, at the cost of a sometimes high degree of complexity. The only exception is Paris, where social support is generally more generous and where threshold effects remain. Taken as a whole, local social support scales have been brought into line with the RSA scale, whereas prior to 2008 they were more in line with the RMI scale, which confirms the guiding role played by national scales on local scales. In particular, we examine the effects of these transformations on the standard of living of recipient households and on incentives to work.

Diagnosing the UK productivity slowdown: which sectors matter and why?

“…Improvements to the UK's telecoms output deflator suggest that it declined by between 37% and 96% between 2010 and 2017 (Abdirahman et al . 2022), and a revised deflator adopted by the ONS (Martin 2021) captures a price decline that shows up in the large rise in its real value‐added per hour, as illustrated in Figure 1. However, there appears to be a puzzle: why then does telecommunications appear as the one of the biggest contributors to the slowdown in ‘within’ labour productivity growth in the UK ICT sector—and indeed, why does ICT overall appear to be one of the bigger contributors to the aggregate slowdown?…”

“…For the case of telecommunications, Abdirahman et al . (2022) show that the greater the use of volume (in terms of bytes of data) rather than revenue weights, the larger the decline in the deflator, and the faster the growth in real terms output. The difference can be large when there is rapid change in a sector, due in this example to technological shifts such as greater compression, more bandwidth and faster speeds, such that the relationship between volume and revenue shifts.…”

“…Abdirahman et al . 2022). The weights, therefore, have an important meaning in the analysis of the sectoral contributions to aggregate labour productivity growth.…”