Measuring growth

Measuring pro-poor growth

The growth incidence curve gives growth rates by quantiles ranked by income. Integrating this curve up to the headcount index of poverty gives a measure of the rate of “propoor growth” consistent with the Watts index for the level of poverty. Examples are given using survey data for China during the 1990s.

Measuring Growth with Vertical Scales

A vertical score scale is needed to measure growth across multiple tests in terms of absolute changes in magnitude. Since the warrant for subsequent growth interpretations depends upon the assumption that the scale has interval properties, the validation of a vertical scale would seem to require methods for distinguishing interval from ordinal. In taking up this issue, two different perspective...

Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space.

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under the assumption that measurement error in using observed light as an indicator of income is uncorrelated...

Measuring Money Growth When Financial Markets

Measuring the stability of individual growth patterns.

Two measures of stability based on longitudinal growth data are described. One, termed a growth constancy index, is based on the variation of each individual's (standardized) measurement about his or her average. The other, called a growth separation index, measures the extent to which individual growth curves cross each other. The uses of these indices are described and formulae for calculatin...