6th IMF Statistical Forrum : Measuring Economic Welfare in the Digital Age: What and How? | International Monetary Fund | 19 November 2018 | International Monetary Fund, 1900 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20431, USA

Call for Papers
The 6th Statistical Forum of the International Monetary Fund is a platform for policymakers, academics, researchers, and compilers of economic and financial data to come together to discuss cutting-edge issues in macroeconomic and financial statistics and to build support for statistical improvements.

The theme of this year’s Statistical Forum is Measuring Economic Welfare in the Digital Age: What and How? Digitalization of economy and social interactions has renewed the demand for indicators of welfare beyond GDP, such as those highlighted in the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi report (2009), and the IMF (2018) paper on Measuring the Digital Economy The Forum Program Committee seeks proposals for empirical or conceptual papers on the measures needed to understand aspects of welfare not captured in standard GDP and price statistics, and on techniques for constructing these measures. Topics of primary interest are detailed in the draft Agenda below.

Authors interested in contributing a paper to the Sixth Statistical Forum should submit an indication of interest noting the preferred session(s) from those in the Forum’s agenda, and short abstract by Friday, June 1, 2018 to STAForum@imf.org. Please use the contact author’s name as the name of the attached file. Authors of selected proposals will be contacted by Friday, June 22, 2018. The deadline for submitting a draft of the paper is October 8, and the final version and presentation is requested no later than October 31. In evaluating the proposals, the Program Committee will consider relevance to the theme and areas of interest of the Forum, originality, feasibility, and the importance of the contribution. Travel and hotel expenses of the presenting author will be covered by the conference organizers. Further information on the conference program will be posted on the IMF website www.imf.org.

Preliminary Agenda
Session 1. Why do we need indicators of economic welfare beyond GDP?
Session 2. What is economic welfare and its key features?

Dimensions that need to be discussed include:

1. Measures of willingness-to-pay and households’ nonmarket production of services for their own consumption;
2. Services of volunteers;
3. Free products funded by advertising and collection of user data;
4. Use of natural resources, including measurement of environmental degradation;
5. Income and wealth distributions as complements to national accounts aggregates;
6. Governance and corruption.

Session 3. Is digitalization all for the good? What are the negative side effects?
Session 4. From theory to practice. How can we measure economic welfare?
Session 5. Sustainability and environmental impacts
Session 6. What is the current state of play in official statistics for measuring economic welfare?
Session 7. Priorities and constraints: benefit-cost analysis.
Session 8. Closing panel: Policy conclusions and Recommendations.

2018 Speakers

Louis Marc Ducharme
Chief Statistician and Data Officer, and Director, Statistics Department, IMF

David Lipton
First Deputy Managing Director, IMF

Charles Hulten
University of Maryland

Leonard Nakamura
Federal Reserve Bank, Philadelphia

Lucas Chancel
Paris School of Economics

Anil Arora
Chief Statistician, Canada

Gabriel Quirós
IMF Statistics Department

Marshall Reinsdorf
IMF Statistics Department

Rendra Achyunda
Statistics Indonesia

Peter Van de Ven
OECD

Carol A. Robbins
National Science Foundation (USA)

Wendy Li
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis

Kevin Fox
UNSW, Sydney

Richard Heys
Office for National Statistics (UK))

Tao Zhang
Deputy Managing Director, IMF

Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, Deputy director, IMF Research Department

Lizhi Liu
Georgetown University

Zhao Li Meng,
JD Finance Institute

Peter J. Klenow,
Stanford University

Gerard Thomas Rice
Director, IMF Communication Department

Ian Goldin
University of Oxford

Gillian Tett
Financial Times

Jim Balsillie
Chair, Centre for International Governance Innovation

Christine Lagarde
Managing Director, IMF