Is Newer Better? Penn World Table Revisions and the Growth Literature
William Larson,
Chris Papageorgiou (),
Arvind Subramania and
Simon Johnson
Additional contact information
Arvind Subramania: Peterson Institute and John Hopkins
No 858, 2009 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics
Abstract:
Versions 6.1 and 6.2 of Penn World Tables (PWT) have essentially the same methodology and the same underlying data, but report significantly different growth numbers. It is not the case that 6.2 is better or worse than 6.1; it is inherent in the PWT approach that some data will vary a great deal across versions and there is no way to determine which of the existing versions is “best”. We examine 13 leading studies of growth for “Table Invariant” results that are robust across different versions of PWT. Table Invariant results are common in studies examining cross-sectional or very long run data; in contrast, results based on higher frequency data are less likely to be robust in this sense, and annual data are particularly problematic. This lack of robustness can be attributed in part to poor data quality in lower income countries, which has been flagged in the Tables’ own health warnings. The lack of robustness is also due to the PWT’s methodology for constructing and compiling the data. This methodology renders data for countries with relatively small total GDP and data distant from the current benchmark year especially variable. We propose an alternative way to use PWT data that might be less prone to some of these issues.
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)
Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2009/paper_858.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed009:858
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in 2009 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().