Gerry and all
On the measurement of national accounts across countries:
1. OECD and IMF and UN data is widely available on diskette, which is a
huge part of the battle.
2. Preliminary accounts could be created using an approximation, as we
did in our book. Alice Amsden did something like this in her first
publication, in the CJE. Her methodology was not adequate, but we have
better sources and methods now.
3. There are international I-O data sets, so for some countries at least
one could provide more refined measures and hence judge the accuracy
of the first approximations.
4. I strongly support Duncan's idea of building an accessible database, at
least for the basic raw data.
Anwar