1. New Indicators for the MEI
Nadim Ahmad
OECD Statistics Directorate
Short-Term Economic Statistics Working Party
Paris, June 2008

2. 4 Target Areas
Entrepreneurship
House Price Indices
Labour Productivity
Accession Process
Index of Services?

3. Entrepreneurship Work on Short term Indicators of Business dynamics
Scoping study using EU data for demonstrated feasibility of using LFS data to create:
(a) monthly/quarterly estimates of self-employment and/or business ownership rates
(b) quarterly estimates of self-employment ‘start-up’ rates
(c) self-employment ‘survival’ rates

4. Examples – UK: ‘start-ups’

5. ‘Survival rates’ Probability of Remaining in Self-Employment by Quarter – UK, 2000-2006

6. Entrepreneurship But also the need to resolve a number of issues:
Small sample sizes create, for some countries, volatile start-up rates
A more serious problem for ‘survival rates’ as responses to “in self-emp for 0-3 months’ ; “4-6 months”; “7-9 months” etc get incrementally smaller
Data is NSA.
So, need to establish: (a) SA techniques (b) trend estimates of start-ups and (c) averaging over-time for survival rates (so, not really a ST indicator)

7. House Price Indices
Initial OECD country scoping study to create inventory of HPIs across OECD countries as input into Handbook on HPIs (now being led by Eurostat).

8. HPIs Monthly/Quarterly data available for most OECD countries
AUSTRALIA
KOREA
AUSTRIA
MEXICO
CANADA
NETHERLANDS
CZECH REPUBLIC
NEW ZEALAND
DENMARK
NORWAY
FINLAND
FRANCE
PORTUGAL
GERMANY
 GREECE
SPAIN
HUNGARY
SWEDEN
ICELAND
SWITZERLAND
IRELAND
 UNITED KINGDOM
UNITED STATES

9. House Price Indices But a number of issues require resolution
Best Practice/Concepts/Definitions (to form part of the Handbook)...to help determine....
the most appropriate national source (some countries have multiple sources)
Cross-country methodological differences – representativeness, weights, quality etc

10. Monthly Labour productivity
Building on development of ULC database, intention is to use similar sources of info to derive Q labour productivity estimates.
Likely to face similar obstacles, especially volatility, and will need to investigate whether trending and benchmarking techniques will also resolve/ameliorate these obstacles.

11. OECD Accession Country Process
CHILE
ESTONIA,
ISRAEL,
RUSSIA,
SLOVENIA

12. Index of Services
Building on earlier study and ‘Compilation Manual for IOS Production’, investigate scope and comparability of IOS data (and sectoral components) for OECD countries.
Earlier study revealed scope in AUS, CAN, JPN,KOR, MEX, NZL and US and EU (via Regulation).
But further investigations needed: e.g. deflators, sectoral coverage, correlation with SBS.