The global financial crisis is usually seen as a failure of neoclassical economic theory and neoliberal policy, but it also represented an epistemological failure. Forecasters who missed the crisis neglected to include the financial sector in their models, while aggregate indicators such as GDP failed in spite (or perhaps because) of their heavy emphasis on financially driven growth. In contrast to both critics and proponents of GDP who see it as a purely statistical measure, this article argues that GDP is in fact a form of numerical rhetoric. Political messages in such estimates were explicit until the early twentieth century, but have since become implicit in hidden assumptions. To uncover the narratives built-in to GDP's view of finance, the article conducts a thought-experiment comparing GDP with two counterfactual indicators corresponding to historical views of finance as either non-productive or an actual cost to society. The analysis shows how changing this single assumption leads to very different narratives regarding the class-balance of workers vs. capitalists, the relative importance of consumption, and the extent of space that exists for public policy to influence the economy. The article concludes with some thoughts on making the implicit assumptions in GDP explicit, and opening up the debate to the broader public in a transparent way.

This study explores the relationship between railroad integration and regional development on the European periphery between 1870 and 1910, based on a regional data set including 291 spatial units. Railroad integration is proxied by railroad density, while per capita GDP is used as an indicator of economic development. The period under study is of particular relevance as it has been associated with the second wave of railroad construction in Europe and also coincides with the industrialization of most of the continent. Overall, we found that railroads had a significant and positive impact on the growth of per capita GDP across Europe. The magnitude of this relationship appears to be relatively modest, but the results obtained are robust with respect to a number of different specifications. From a geographical perspective, we found that railroads had a significantly greater influence on regions located in countries on the northern periphery of Europe than in other outlying areas. They also helped the economies of these areas to begin the process of catching up with the continent’s industrialized core. In contrast, the regions on the southern periphery showed lower levels of economic growth, with this exacerbating the preexisting divergence in economic development. The expansion of the railroad network in them was unable to homogenize the diffusion of economic development and tended to further benefit the regions that were already industrialized. In most of the cases, the capital effect was magnified, and this contributed to the consolidation of newly created nation-states.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is often treated as shorthand for national economic well-being, even though it was never intended to be; it is a measure of (some) of the marketable output of the economy. This paper reviews several developments in measuring welfare beyond GDP that were recently presented at the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) annual conference in May 2019. The papers discussed fall into three broad areas. First, a significant amount of work has focused on incorporating information about the distribution of income, consumption and wealth in the national accounts. Second, the effects of digitisation and the growth of the internet highlight the potential value in measuring time use as a measure of welfare. Third, the digital revolution has spawned many new, often ‘free’ goods, the welfare consequences of which are difficult to measure. Other areas, such as government services, are also difficult to measure. Measuring economic welfare properly matters because it affects the decisions made by government and society. GDP does a reasonable job of measuring the marketable output of the economy (which remains important for some policies), but it should be downgraded; more attention should be given to measures that reflect both objective and subjective measures of well-being, and measures that better reflect the heterogeneity of peoples' experiences.

Can officially reported output figures be externally validated? This paper presents a dynamic panel framework for assessing statistics using verifiable signals of economic activity. In this context, satellite readings of nitrogen dioxide, a byproduct of combustion, are forwarded. The problem of validating China's reported gross domestic product at the sub-national level during two recent downturns is considered. During the Great Recession period, reported figures are validated for some regions, but not others, including specifically those known to be inaccurate.

Growing concern about the biodiversity crisis has led to a proliferation of conservation responses, but with wide variation between countries in the levels of engagement and investment. Much of this variation is inevitably attributed to differences between nations in wealth. However, the relationship between environmentalism and wealth is complex and it is increasingly apparent that other factors are also involved. We review hypotheses that have been developed to explain variation in broad environmentalism and show that many of the factors that explain such variation in individuals, such as wealth, age and experience, also explain differences between nation states. We then assess the extent to which these factors explain variation between nation states in responses to and investment in the more specific area of biodiversity conservation. Unexpectedly, quality of governance explained substantially more variation in public and state investment in biodiversity conservation than did direct measures of wealth. The results inform assessments of where conservation investments might most profitably be directed in the future and suggest that metrics relating to governance might be of considerable use in conservation planning.

What is progress and what is not progress? We can talk about progress in lots of different arenas; we will focus primarily on economic and scientific progress, but also make brief reference to cultural and moral progress. In our discussion, we want to distinguish, especially, between overall, long-term progress and narrower, shorter-term progress or regress. We will refer to these as “global” and “local” progress, respectively. Of course, one can also regress; therefore, we will also look at instances where progress, along some dimension, slows or even moves backwards. Generally, such regress is local, and often still in a context of broader, global progress. In scientific progress, for example, there are many instances of short-term progress which, if not completely discarded or disproved, are at least substantially modified or fundamentally challenged. And yet, those research paths, even when later abandoned, still contributed to the overall progress of the field. In that sense, the regress (that is, rejection or modification of previous theories) is corrected by, but not in conflict with, the overall progress. In the case of economic progress, the concept of regress usually takes on a different form in which things that aren’t advancing progress don’t necessarily stop it, but are simply retarding progress — that is, making the rate of progress less efficient. The consequence, we suggest, is that when talking about economic progress, objections to certain consequences of economic progress (for instance, income inequality — a type of regress, in our terminology) should not be cordoned off and dealt with independently, but should be incorporated into the way we think about economic progress itself — as instances of local regress within a context of global progress. We explore the effects of these different relations between progress and regress to suggest some of the challenges those seeking to broaden the standard measure, GDP, to incorporate other social values of well-being will face moving forward.

The New Materialisms in IR scholarship seek to transcend the divide between matter and ideas, with among others such concepts as practices, or artifacts. This paper makes a start in developing a systematic methodology for the New Materialisms. It proposes Peirce’s semeiotics as one way to unpack how practices and artifacts are ideational and simultaneously material. Peircean semeiotics is a semeiotics of materialism, which creates room for material constitution and analyses practices and artifacts as signs. Peircean semeiotics acknowledges that many signs are objects and practices in the material world, and therefore underlie material constraints, while they also limit and enable the possibilities for action upon the world. Simultaneously though, as signs they convey a particular meaning to the people who surround them, not always by intent. Just as language, material things can signify by arbitrary social convention, but they can also signify by resembling the object they represent, or by being causally related to it. The linguistic model is thus incomplete to study the significative role of material reality. I will illustrate the use of Peircean semeiotics on an analysis of GDP as an inscription device and a complex sign.

A concern in the political economy is how national income is shared between labor and capital. This study evaluates long-term changes in factor income shares in three agri-food industries, their attribution to the level of factor usage or to factor compensation rates, and relation to changes in capital intensity and factor productivity. We find long-term stability in the profit and labor shares of farm income, decline in the profit share of agricultural services industry income, and increase in the profit share of food manufacturing income due to fewer productivity improvements being passed on to wage increases.