NTTS 2017 satellite event in Brussels, 17 March 2017

Organisers:

• Eurostat: Ales Capek, Marleen De Smedt, Christine Gerstberger, Paul Konijn, Isabelle Remond Tiedrez, Ani Todorova, John Verrinder
• European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation: Marianne Paasi

Chair:

• Silke Stapel-Weber (Director National Accounts, Prices and Key Indicators, Eurostat)

The overall objective of this one-day event is to discuss the progress in the measurement of productivity, growth and intangibles from the perspective of official statistics and of recent contributions of economic research resulting from a number of projects funded under the Seventh European Union’s Research Framework Programme (FP7).

Background

Evidence based policy making and decision making needs relevant and high quality data and statistics. In the context of the European economic policy making on growth and on productivity policies, the Commission carries out its Annual Growth Survey as part of the European semester. Key data in this process are provided by the National Accounts which allow for analysing the structure of economies and their development over time, as well as data from FP funded research projects (e.g. EU-KLEMS).

While important progress is made both in economic underpinnings of policies and data provisions, recent findings in economic research have shown that there still are many unknown variables which underpin the growth and productivity performances in advanced knowledge based countries such as those of Europe.

Potential synergies among research and development projects

A number of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) FP7 funded research projects on productivity and growth, intangible investment and global value chains have enhanced our knowledge on the key determinants/factors of modern growth and productivity patterns. All these projects have in common that they do not only contribute to ‘growth economics’ but that they tackle the issues of empirical measurement of GDP and productivity and that they all use the SNA methodology and official statistics as the basis of their empirical analysis while providing open access to the new data (on a voluntary basis).

At the same time, several projects of the official statistics community are developing concrete statistical products on competitiveness, growth and global value chains. The introduction of the new methodology for National Accounts in September 2014[1], completed the capitalisation of research and development into the accounts and encouraged further methodological work on intangibles.

These parallel work streams open interesting opportunities for economic research and official statistics to be mutually supporting.

Objectives of the event

In this satellite event we want to present the recent progress in solving the challenges in measurement from the perspectives of both official statistics and economic research in the field. The discussions are organised by topic: productivity, intangible investment and global value chains.