Descrizione del progetto
Districarsi tra le politiche di misurazione economica
Gli indicatori macroeconomici, spina dorsale della governance economica, esercitano un’influenza immensa, orientando le decisioni politiche e plasmando il nostro futuro. Tuttavia la natura apparentemente oggettiva di queste metriche nasconde una verità preoccupante: le loro definizioni e misurazioni sono tutt’altro che chiare. Tale ambiguità produce vincitori e vinti, comporta costi ambientali e pone la domanda: perché ci affidiamo a queste misurazioni errate? In quest’ottica, il progetto FICKLEFORMS, finanziato dal CER, intende svelare i fattori sociali, politici ed economici che guidano le formule alla base di questi indicatori. Si esaminerà l’evoluzione degli indicatori chiave nei paesi OCSE centrali e si studieranno gli sforzi di armonizzazione statistica su scala globale. FICKLEFORMS ci aiuterà quindi a superare i pregiudizi insiti nelle metriche economiche tradizionali.
Obiettivo
Macroeconomic indicators are integral to economic governance. Measurements of growth, unemployment, inflation and public deficits inform policy, for example through growth targets and the inflation-indexation of wages. These indicators tell us “how economies are doing” and citizens often punish politicians who fail to deliver on them.
Their air of objectivity notwithstanding, it is far from self-evident how these indicators should be defined and measured. Our choices here have deeply distributional consequences, producing winners and losers, and will shape our future, for example when GDP figures hide the cost of environmental degradation. So why do we measure our economies the way we do?
Criticisms of particular measures are hardly new but their real-world effect has been limited. The project therefore asks: which social, political and economic factors shape the formulas used to calculate macroeconomic indicators? Extant research offers detailed histories of statistics, mostly in single countries. But we lack theoretical and empirical tools to describe and explain differences in measurement formulas between countries and over time.
FICKLEFORMS will provide such understanding through five sub-projects. The first systematically compares the evolution of four indicators in four central OECD countries: the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Germany. The second analyses the timing and content of statistical harmonization efforts through the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank. The third constructs a new database of “measures of measures” to quantitatively test hypotheses emerging from the previous sub-projects. The final two sub-projects reach beyond the OECD and study the politics of macroeconomic measurement in China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
This project will promote public debate over meaningful measures, allow policy-makers to reflect on current practices, and sensitize academics who use macroeconomic data about their political roots.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
1012WX Amsterdam
Paesi Bassi