The Money Metric, Price and Quantity Aggregation and Welfare Measurement
Abstract
The paper presents a general theory of the aggregation of prices and quantities that unifies the field and relates topics that in the past have been treated separately and unsatisfactorily, or not at all. The theory does without the common but unrealistic assumptions of homotheticity, or representative agents and is valid with or without an explicit utility maximization assumption. Two different derivations are given, one in continuous time, using Divisia integrals, and one employing more traditional discrete arguments. The unifying concept is the money metric, which is interpreted as a partial welfare indicator, rather than as a comprehensive welfare measure. On this basis, a consistent set of chained price and quantity indexes for a set of additive time series, such as those in the national income and product accounts, is derived. All variants of the theory lead to Törnqvist indexes defined on the appropriate data set. A numerical example confirms that in the non-homothetic case, these indexes are superior both to Fisher’s ‘ideal’ index and to the consumer surplus approximation.Download Info
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Bibliographic Info
Article provided by De Gruyter in its journal The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics.
Volume (Year): contributions.3 (2003)
Issue (Month): 1 ()
Pages: 7
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Web page: http://www.degruyter.com
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Web: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/bejm
Related research
Keywords: Chain indexes; Consumer surplus; Cost-of-living; Divisia integral; Money metric Price index; Quantity index; Real consumption; Törnqvist index;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- C43 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Index Numbers and Aggregation
- D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Hillinger, Claude, 2008.
"Measuring Real Value and Inflation,"
Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal,
Kiel Institute for the World Economy, vol. 2(20), pages 1-26.
- Hillinger, Claude, 2008. "Measuring Real Value and Inflation," Economics Discussion Papers 2008-5, Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
- Hillinger, Claude, 2007. "Measuring real value and inflation," Discussion Papers in Economics 2090, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
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