Public Investment: Some Measuring Instruments

On Some Errors Related to the Graduation of Measuring Instruments

The error on a real quantity Y due to the graduation of the measuring instrument may be approximately represented, when the graduation is regular and fines down, by a Dirichlet form on R whose square field operator does not depend on the probability law of Y as soon as this law possesses a continuous density. This feature is related to the “arbitrary functions principle” (Poincaré, Hopf). We gi...

Reading Measuring Instruments

Measuring Intangible Investment

Recent years have seen a growth in the literature on a variety of aspects of intangible investment, the complement of the more familiar investment in tangible assets such as buildings, plant, and equipment. For economic and business analysts this change in emphasis necessitates the selection of a meaningful metric for intangible investment and the firm’s total capital stock of tangible and inta...

Measuring Investment in Learning

Heart rate variability (i.e., low frequency:high frequency ratio) was measured to differentiate invested cognitive effort during the acquisition and retention of a novel task. Participants (12 male, M1⁄4 25.1 year, SD1⁄4 3.6; 12 female, M1⁄4 22.8 year, SD1⁄4 1.1) were required to produce Braille equivalents of English letter primes on a standardized keyboard in proactive or retroactive conditio...

Measuring Productivity in the Public Sector: Some Conceptual Problems

In many sectors of the economy, governments either provide various services at no cost or at highly subsidized prices. Examples are the health, education and general government sectors. The paper analyzes three possible general methods to measure the price and quantity of nonmarket government outputs. If quantity information on nonmarket outputs is available, then the first two methods of price...