This award funds the Penn World Table (PWT). This is a data resource for making international comparisons of economic performance (income, output, and production) across countries. The data have been widely used both as a dependent variable to be explained (studies of the determinants of economic performance) and as a control variable included in other studies as a way to control for differences across countries in economic resources.
The PWT continues to be updated on a regular basis to take into account changes in economic performance. In addition to requesting support for these updates, the PIs want to improve the methods used to make the international comparisons. The PWT has relied in part on a comparison program conducted by the UN and the World Bank. That comparison has focused on the expenditure side of national accounts (what a country consumes, invests, spends on government activities, exports, and imports). An alternative way to compare economies is to consider the production side of national accounts. The PWT team is collaborating with a leading European research group to incorporate these production comparisons into the PWT. They develop separate estimates of production and income that are comparable across countries, and use several different analytic approaches in order to appraise which approach is most effective for future maintenance of the PWT.
They also develop improved models of the relationship between implicit growth rates implied by their comparisons to national growth rates calculated through national income accounts. The question is how to use economic theory and empirical methods to best account for economic growth when both economic structures and relative prices are changing over time.
The Penn World Tables are widely used by researchers, policymakers, and students who are interested in international economic comparisons.
