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The paper describes the statistical system in China, with a specific focus on the quarterly national accounts and the main source data. After reviewing the progress already made to meet increasing demand for short-term indicators by domestic and international users, we focus on four key issues that remain unresolved, namely: (1) the compilation of discrete data as against the current cumulative reporting; (2) the controversial identification of moving holidays and seasonal effects; (3) the need for new and better targeted source data to monitor infra-annual developments more effectively; (4) the remaining statistical gap for a demand-based estimation of quarterly GDP. To address these questions, we concluded that basic source data and agents reporting strategies need to be carefully reviewed and the possibility considered that sample surveys may soon complement administrative registers more often than in the current practice. Room for further, major progress in the quarterly national accounts of China could be limited in the very short term and the main pitfalls currently affecting source data must therefore be addressed as a matter of urgency.

In this paper we focus on Italian aggregate quarterly time series covering the 1980-2008 sample period and test the presence and size of wealth effects on consumption, taking separately account of financial assets and residential property on the basis of new stock measures. We find sound evidence in favour of a cointegrating relation, in which both wealth components display the expected, positive effect on households‘ consumption. In particular, our results point to a lower marginal propensity to consume out of housing than out of non housing net worth, with a respective size laying in the range of 1.5-2 and 4-6 cents. Following the estimate of a vector error correction model, we discuss the role played by transitory and permanent shocks in driving changes in the variables we consider. We have found that both consumption and wealth respond almost exclusively to permanent shocks, which are the sole determinants of the common stochastic trend in our theoretical set-up. As a result, we are confident that our estimates of wealth coefficients in the cointegrating vector match very closely the true long run marginal propensity to consume for Italian households.