The Next Generation of the Penn World Table

Abstract

We describe the theory and practice of real GDP comparisons across countries and over time. Version 8 of the Penn WorldFor over four decades, the Penn World Table (PWT) has been a standard source of data on real GDP across countries. Making use of prices collected across countries in benchmark years by the International Comparisons Program (ICP), and using these prices to construct purchasing-power-parity (PPP) exchange rates, PWT converts gross domestic product (GDP) at national prices to a common currency-US dollars-making them comparable across countries. Previous versions of PWT, each based on a newer ICP benchmark, were described extensively by their originators Heston 1988, 1991;Heston and Summers 1996). From version 8 onward, development has moved to the University of California, Davis and the University of Groningen, while retaining the PWT initials and with continued input from Alan Heston at the University of Pennsylvania.1 In this paper we describe the main changes to the measurement of real GDP that have been introduced in this "next generation" of PWT.1 PWT version 7 is based on the 2005 ICP prices. PWT version 8.1 is still based on the 2005 benchmark but has new features described in this paper, and is available online at: http://www.rug.nl/research/ggdc/data/pwt/.

Capital Goods Trade and Economic Development

“…This set includes both developed and developing countries and accounts for about 90 percent of world GDP in version 8.0 of the Penn World Tables (see Feenstra, Inklaar, and Timmer, 2013). Our calibration strategy uses cross-country data on income per worker, bilateral trade, and output for capital goods and intermediate goods sectors, and prices of capital goods, intermediate goods, and final goods.…”

“…Cross-country differences in income per worker are large: The income per worker in the top decile is more than 50 times the income per worker in the bottom decile (Penn World Tables version 8.0; see Feenstra, Inklaar, and Timmer, 2013). Development accounting exercises such as those by Caselli (2005), Hall and Jones (1999), and Klenow and Rodríguez-Clare (1997) show that roughly 50 percent of the differences in income per worker are accounted for by differences in factors of production (capital and labor) and the rest is attributed to differences in aggregate total factor productivity (TFP).…”

Foreign Aid, Poor Data, and the Fragility of Macroeconomic Inference

“…The Penn World Table 8.0 (Feenstra et al, 2013), now provided by the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC), introduces a wide range of methodological changes, many with the aim of increasing consistency across versions and reducing the amount of speculation in the reported data, e.g. by removing 22 countries with particularly poor data coverage from the table.…”

“…In the process, the authors also discarded the RGDPL series JMT base their analysis on. I therefore use the conceptually most similar series included in the dataset, labelled RGDPna, which the authors confirm to be the measure most in line with previous versions of the PWT (Feenstra et al, 2013).…”

Влияние Внешних Факторов На Развитие Рынка Консалтинговых Услуг

“…database, version 9.0, Feenstra et al, 2015;and on IMF, World Economic Outlook, 2015, for the definition of the dummies relating to the large currency depreciations associated, or not, with banking crises. Note: The estimations rely on recently released PWT data, which cover a maximum of 175 countries.…”