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Recently much attention has been devoted to superlative indexes in the context of the national accounts. In this paper we advocate the use of the implicit Tornqvist quantity index to measure real GDP. This index, which has been proposed by Diewert and Morrison (1986), has never received serious consideration in the literature. Yet, compared to the better-known Fisher index, the implicit Tornqvist index of real GDP has a number of advantages. Thus, it can be shown to be exact for the Translog GDP function, it allows for a complete multiplicative decomposition of nominal and real GDP, and it is consistent with state-of-the-art measures of total factor productivity that typically rely on the Tornqvist aggregation. Estimates for a sample of 26 countries are reported. We find that the Laspeyres quantity index still used by the statistical agencies of most countries tends to underestimate real growth. Over the 1960-1996 period, the cumulated shortfall was as much as 13.4% of GDP in the case of Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests five major economies of the world, United Kingdom, Japan, Brazil, Chin and lastly, India, for the changes in the monetary policy decisions that have been implemented following the Covid-19 outbreak. The assessment was undertaken in the form of an event study analysis, further substantiated with a regression analysis conducted for exploring the significance of CPI and real GDP in predicting the policy interest rates in the economy. The results of the event study analysis presented that the abnormal changes in the interest rates were statistically significant in the case of the United Kingdom, Brazil, and China, while the abnormal changes were found to be statistically insignificant in the case of India and Japan., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Li, Sun and Chen.)