On spurious differences in growth performance and on the misuse of National Accounts data for governance purposes

The paper ventures forward into the largely unknown terrain of the political economy of statistical measurement. National Accounts data are shown to be indispensable for economic governance, yet, it is argued, they can also be misused in this context when spurious conclusions about economic policy are drawn from spurious differences in growth performance. That the US economy grows faster than most European economies since the mid-1990s is widely accepted as a stylized fact; and this had a strong impact on policy reform debates in Europe over the last decade. The paper questions the legitimacy of this debate by calculating the proportion of the US lead in growth over the European Union that can be explained simply in terms of differing statistical methods.