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Groningen Growth and Development Centre
Faculty of Economics and Business
Groningen Growth and Development Centre Productivity Penn World Table

PWT News

Alan Heston (1934-2024)

Date:26 October 2024
It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Alan Heston, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the original architects of the Penn World Table (PWT). His pioneering work in international price comparisons and economic measurement has profoundly shaped our understanding of global economic development and living standards.
Value added prices across sectors

GGDC Releases Productivity Level Database 2023 Edition

Date:23 October 2023

Comparing productivity at the sectoral level requires estimates of relatives prices at the sectoral level. The 2023 edition of the Productivity Level Database provides the most comprehensive GGDC dataset to date, covering 84 countries and 12 sectors across...

Penn World Table

TPI blog on the Penn World Table

Date:18 July 2023

The Productivity Institute recently published a new blog introducing the Penn World Table (PWT). Authored by Ryan Marapin, Robert Inklaar and Reitze Gouma, this blog showcases two example analyses that illustrate the potential of the PWT data set, along...

Penn World Table

PWT 10.01 has been released

Date:09 February 2023

We have released a minor update of the Penn World Table, version 10.01. This update changes part of the calculation of investment prices and most notably impact capital growth. Details of this change have been documented in an updated 'what is new'...

PWT 10.0 TFP growth China

The Economist: China is trying to protect its economy from Western pressure

Date:30 May 2022

On May 26 The Economist featured an article on China's attempts to mitigate its exposure to Western influence, using data from the Penn World Table version 10.0.

The Economist: Chasing Asia

The Economist: Manufacturing hope in Africa

Date:22 March 2021

On March 20th, The Economist featured research by the GGDC and UNU-WIDER on the manufacturing renaissance in Africa. A key finding is that the share of people working in manufacturing in sub-Saharan Africa has risen from 7.2% of the total in 2010 to 8.4%....

PWT 10.0 has been launched

Date:15 January 2021

Today, we have launched version 10.0 of the Penn World Table. This version of the database covers 183 countries and the years from 1950 to 2019. We have incorporated the latest data from the International Comparison Program, led by the World Bank, which...

Penn World Table

PWT 9.1 has been released

Date:11 April 2019

Today, version 9.1 of the Penn World Table has been released. The data can be downloaded from this page. This new version has the following features, described in more detail here:

Penn World Table

PWT 9.1: release delay

Date:23 January 2019

As many of you have noticed and noted, we have not managed to meet our goal for publishing PWT 9.1 in late 2018. Providing a high-quality data release that meets the ambitions set out last summer, especially with regard to improved capital measurement. We...

IARIW 2018 General Conference

Income and Wealth conference activity

Date:10 September 2018

At the latest General Conference of the International Association of Research in Income and Wealth, GGDC researchers contributed substantially to the program:

AEA Papers and Proceedings

Online prices for real consumption comparisons

Date:11 July 2018

Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer published a paper in the AEA Papers and Proceedings on using online prices for comparisons of real consumption levels across countries (open access version here), jointly with Alberto Cavallo (HBS), Erwin Diewert (UBC) and ...

Penn World Table

PWT 9.1: Release information

Date:11 July 2018

Work on a new version of the Penn World Table (PWT) is progressing and has advanced to the point where we can provide more information on the timing and content of this new release:

Thomas Piketty

Piketty gives Maddison lecture

Date:01 June 2018

On May 23, Thomas Piketty gave the Maddison lecture, on the topic of globalization and inequality. See here for some highlights and how Piketty's work relates to research of GGDC.

IMF World Economic Outlook

IMF WEO relies on GGDC data

Date:18 April 2018

In the IMF's latest World Economic Outlook, its chapter 3 on manufacturing jobs relies heavily on data provided by the GGDC, including the World Input-Output Database and the GGDC Productivity Level Database, as well as relying on the data from the World...

Inaugural lecture Robert Inklaar

Beyond Growth? Robert Inklaar's inaugural lecture

Date:08 March 2018

On March 6, Robert Inklaar gave his inaugural lecture to officially accept his position of Professor in the Economics of Productivity and Welfare. In this lecture, he established how productivity growth in the 21st century has been low by historical...

MIT's Samberg Center

Sessions at SEM conference

Date:28 July 2017

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar each organised a session at the 4th annual conference of the Society for Economic Measurement, at MIT, from July 26 to 28. The session by Marcel Timmer was on trade and global value chains and included presentations by Robe...

Robert Inklaar

Robert Inklaar appointed full professor

Date:15 July 2017

On July 1, Robert Inklaar was appointed Professor in the Economics of Productivity and Welfare at the University of Groningen. The main research objective of this new chair is to better understand how automation will affect not just economic activity, but...

NEMO Kennislink

Robots & the future of jobs? It's complicated

Date:31 May 2017

On the (Dutch) Kennislink website, Robert Inklaar discusses how the spread of robots is a challenge for those with jobs involving routine tasks, yet embracing robots may be preferable to jobs disappearing overseas.

Digging into Data challenge

'Big data' grant: online prices & living standards

Date:29 March 2017

The Transatlantic Platform has awarded a Digging into Data grant of €375,000 to an international team of researchers, with the team for the Netherlands led by Robert Inklaar and also including Marcel Timmer. The grant is awarded for a project to use online...

Alan Heston (r) with Fred Vogel

Alan Heston's ICP memoirs

Date:01 February 2017
Author:Robert Inklaar

Alan Heston, one of the original forces behind the International Comparison Program (ICP) and the Penn World Table has drafted a memoir of these major undertakings, which have transformed international economic statistics over the past half century. We...

Inequality and GDP lecture

Inequality lecture at EIB

Date:20 December 2016

Robert Inklaar lectures today at the European Investment Bank about Inequality and GDP. He will argue that our understanding of income differences across countries depends crucially on accurate and frequent comparisons of prices across countries as...

Het Kasteel

Call for papers – GGDC conference

Date:30 November 2016

On June 28–30, we organise a conference to celebrate the 25 year anniversary of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) in Het Kasteel in Groningen. The conference will feature many prominent speakers: Dale Jorgenson (Harvard) will give an...

Income and Wealth activities

Date:13 September 2016

GGDC researchers played several important roles at the recent General Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW), in Dresden. This biennial conference brings together academic researchers and official...

PWT 9.0 data corrections

Date:19 August 2016

Thanks to helpful user queries, we have found two computation errors in the PWT 9.0 data that were released on June 9 2016:

GDP per person in China and Vietnam

Vietnam as the next China?

Date:10 August 2016

The Economist uses data from the Penn World Table to illustrate how Vietnam's growth in GDP per capita over de past quarter century matches China's growth experience following its liberalizing reforms in the late 1970s.

Globalisation & inequality Summer School

Date:10 August 2016

The GGDC Summer School 2016 took place between July 11 and 15 and featured several lectures by Branko Milanović, on inequality and the role of globalisation, as well as lectures by other renowned scholars. Around 25 students from all over the world...

PWT 9.0 has been released

Date:09 June 2016
Author:Robert Inklaar

A new version of the Penn World Table, 9.0, has been released and is available here.

NBER international comparisons conference

Date:30 May 2016
Author:Robert Inklaar

Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer presented at a conference at MIT on International Comparisons of Income, Prices, and Production, on the upcoming update to version 9 of the Penn World Table. Participants included Nobel laureate Angus Deaton (Princeton),...

World KLEMS conference

Date:27 May 2016
Author:Robert Inklaar

Gaaitzen de Vries, Abdul Azeez Erumban and Marcel Timmer presented at the fourth World KLEMS conference in Madrid on May 23 and 24 on issues of productivity and global value chains

AEJMacroCover

Did the developing world suddenly become much richer?

Date:14 March 2016
Author:Robert Inklaar

The answer is 'no', as shown in a paper by Robert Inklaar and Prasada Rao (University of Queensland) that has just been accepted by the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, which ranks in the top ten of economics journals.

GGDC and societal relevance

Date:18 January 2016
Author:Robert Inklaar

We were very happy that a committee of esteemed colleagues recognized the usefulness of our research and database development efforts in the national Research Review of the faculty's research school, SOM. This helped contribute to the faculty's research...

Globalization and inequality

Summer School on Globalization and Inequality

Date:13 January 2016
Author:Robert Inklaar

This summer, from July 11-15, the GGDC organizes a Summer School on the topic of Globalization and Inequality. Lecturers include Branko Milanović, Remco Oostendorp and Leandro Prados de la Escosura. The Summer School is intended for PhD students, research...

Resource misallocation: where to focus attention?

Date:11 January 2016
Author:Robert Inklaar

Productivity gains from a more efficient allocation of capital and labor across firms are large. However, a recent study of manufacturing firms in low- and middle-income countries by Robert Inklaar, Addisu Lashitew and Marcel Timmer, finds that the gains...

Nominal world GDP trends

World GDP should not be falling

Date:15 December 2015
Author:Robert Inklaar

A recent discussion on VoxEU about trends in world GDP illustrates how the wider use of Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) would lead to figures that are more readily plausible and easier to interpret.

Man and machine

Date:11 December 2015
Author:Robert Inklaar

Herman de Jong and Marcel Timmer contributed to the KVS Preadviezen “De match tussen mens en machine” [The match between man and machine], edited by Bas ter Weel. They presented their contributions at the Behandeling van de KVS Preadviezen in The Hague.

Round table on the future of economic growth research

Date:10 December 2015

Marcel Timmer participated in a round table discussion on 'Future Trends in the Economics of Growth', where he talked about the need for more work on growth of welfare, rather than GDP; see his presentation. The round table was hosted by Mark Sanders of...

PWT 9.0: planned features and approximate release

Date:25 November 2015
Author:Robert Inklaar

The next version of the Penn World Table, version 9.0, is currently under development with numerous changes. There is no firm release date at this point, other than 'as soon as possible'. Our best estimate at this point will be a release in the first...

Productivity and convergence paper accepted in JoE

Date:21 November 2015
Author:Robert Inklaar

A paper by Robert Inklaar and Erwin Diewert on "Measuring industry productivity and cross-country convergence" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Econometrics, in a special issue on economic measurement. The paper finds that cross-country...

Alternative poverty measurement

Date:30 October 2015
Author:Robert Inklaar

Robert Inklaar presented research-in-progress with Jutta Bolt at a World Bank meeting. The main question is whether the World Bank's approach to measuring global poverty does adequate justice to cross-country differences and whether a new method for...

PWT paper appears in AER

Date:05 October 2015
Author:Robert Inklaar

paper co-authored by Robert Feenstra from UC Davis, Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer has appeared in the October issue of the American Economic Review. The paper details the new version of the widely-used Penn World Table, how this database can best be...