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This paper examines the status of GDP compilation in 189 economies against six key criteria that describe national accounts compilation practices: whether the benchmark year is up to date, the availability and timeliness of annual and quarterly GDP, whether GDP by production and expenditure approaches are compiled independently to allow for comparisons, whether estimates by the income approach are available, and the vintage of the System of National Accounts (SNA) applied. We used publicly available information including from the IMF’s Dissemination Standards Bulletin Board (DSBB), and, for 108 developing economies, information provided by the IMF’s real sector advisors stationed in the Fund’s 10 Regional Technical Assistance Centers (RTACs). The data were compared with the UNSD and World Bank databases. We find that 50 percent of economies have acceptable benchmark years, 72 percent report timely annual GDP data, while 55 percent of economies report timely data for quarterly GDP. The study presents some conclusions for priorities of capacity development.

This paper provides evidence about the diffusion of intangible investment across the EU27 member countries and investigates the role of intangible capital as a source of growth to improve our understanding of the international differences in the mix of drivers of productivity growth across Europe. Our study shows that the capitalization of intangible assets, allow identifying additional sources of long-run growth. We show that intangibles have been a relevant source of growth across European countries and that they cannot be omitted from national accounts. In particular, the ―unexplained‖ component of macro-economic dynamics, the Total Factor Productivity, becomes less important, while physical capital turns out to be strongly complementary with intangible capital.