Missing growth measurement in Germany

DOI

Using detailed establishment-level micro data, this paper analyzes for the German case the hypothesis by Aghion et al. (2019), stating that officially published figures for real output growth would be systematically understated. The effect rests on overstated inflation estimates due to imputed prices for disappearing goods and services varieties, where measurable plant entry and exit dynamics play a crucial rule. Our main results regarding understated real output growth lie in the range of 0.39 to 0.54 average annual percentage points for 1998-2016, which is quite closely in line with existing findings for France,(0.5 p.p. 2004-2015) the USA, (0.54 p.p. 1983-2013) and Japan (in different periods). We also find that services sectors appear most affected, and that the effect in East Germany is somewhat larger. We investigate different market share proxies, provide additional robustness analysis and also discuss limitations of the approach.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.15456/ger.2022024.181603
Metadata Access https://www.da-ra.de/oaip/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:oai.da-ra.de:772985
Provenance
Creator Schreiber, Sven; Schmidt, Vanessa
Publisher ZBW - Leibniz Informationszentrum Wirtschaft
Publication Year 2022
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY); Download
OpenAccess true
Contact ZBW - Leibniz Informationszentrum Wirtschaft
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Collection
Discipline Economics; Social and Behavioural Sciences