Beatrice N. Vaccara (died January 7, 1983) was an American economist and economic statistician who worked for the United States Department of Commerce as head of the Bureau of Industrial Economics.
Vaccara was born in Brooklyn, earned a bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College, and completed a master's degree at Columbia University, in economics. She worked at the United States Department of Agriculture and then, from 1954 to 1959, at the Brookings Institution, before joining the Department of Commerce. From 1977 to 1980 she worked at the United States Department of the Treasury before returning to Commerce to lead the Bureau of Industrial Economics. [1]
Vaccara wrote Employment and Output in Protected Manufacturing Industries (Brookings Institution, 1960). [2] With Walter S. Salant, she was a coauthor of Import Liberalization and Employment: The Effects of Unilateral Reductions in United States Import Barriers (Brookings Institution, 1961). [3]
With John Whitefield Kendrick, she edited New Developments in Productivity Measurement and Analysis (University of Chicago Press, 1980). [4]
Vaccara was a recipient of the Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 1974 and of the Presidential Distinguished Executive Award. In 1970, she became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. [1]
In 1983, the Business and Economic Statistics section of the American Statistical Association gave her their Julius Shiskin Award "for her major contributions to economic statistics including the development and application of input/output modeling and improvements to the system of business cycle indicators and for her leadership and direction of practical, policy oriented economic analysis." [5]
Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real gross domestic product, or real GDP.
Robert Merton Solow, GCIH is an American economist whose work on the theory of economic growth culminated in the exogenous growth model named after him. He is currently Emeritus Institute Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been a professor since 1949. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1961, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1987, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. Four of his PhD students, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Diamond and William Nordhaus later received Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences in their own right.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the United States Department of Commerce is a U.S. government agency that provides official macroeconomic and industry statistics, most notably reports about the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States and its various units—states, cities/towns/townships/villages/counties, and metropolitan areas. They also provide information about personal income, corporate profits, and government spending in their National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs).
The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the President of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical research for the White House and prepares the publicly-available annual Economic Report of the President.
In economics, a production function gives the technological relation between quantities of physical inputs and quantities of output of goods. The production function is one of the key concepts of mainstream neoclassical theories, used to define marginal product and to distinguish allocative efficiency, a key focus of economics. One important purpose of the production function is to address allocative efficiency in the use of factor inputs in production and the resulting distribution of income to those factors, while abstracting away from the technological problems of achieving technical efficiency, as an engineer or professional manager might understand it.
Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production process, i.e. output per unit of input, typically over a specific period of time. The most common example is the (aggregate) labour productivity measure, one example of which is GDP per worker. There are many different definitions of productivity and the choice among them depends on the purpose of the productivity measurement and/or data availability. The key source of difference between various productivity measures is also usually related to how the outputs and the inputs are aggregated to obtain such a ratio-type measure of productivity.
Econometrica is a peer-reviewed academic journal of economics, publishing articles in many areas of economics, especially econometrics. It is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Econometric Society. The current editor-in-chief is Guido Imbens.
The Stolper–Samuelson theorem is a basic theorem in Heckscher–Ohlin trade theory. It describes the relationship between relative prices of output and relative factor rewards—specifically, real wages and real returns to capital.
International economics is concerned with the effects upon economic activity from international differences in productive resources and consumer preferences and the international institutions that affect them. It seeks to explain the patterns and consequences of transactions and interactions between the inhabitants of different countries, including trade, investment and transaction.
Export-oriented industrialization (EOI) sometimes called export substitution industrialization (ESI), export led industrialization (ELI) or export-led growth is a trade and economic policy aiming to speed up the industrialization process of a country by exporting goods for which the nation has a comparative advantage. Export-led growth implies opening domestic markets to foreign competition in exchange for market access in other countries.
Trade diversion is an economic term related to international economics in which trade is diverted from a more efficient exporter towards a less efficient one by the formation of a free trade agreement or a customs union. Total cost of good becomes cheaper when trading within the agreement because of the low tariff. This is as compared to trading with countries outside the agreement with lower cost goods but higher tariff. The related term Trade creation is when the formation of a trade agreement between countries decreases the price of the goods for more consumers, and therefore increases overall trade. In this case the more efficient producer with the agreement increases trade.
In economics, total-factor productivity (TFP), also called multi-factor productivity, is usually measured as the ratio of aggregate output to aggregate inputs. Under some simplifying assumptions about the production technology, growth in TFP becomes the portion of growth in output not explained by growth in traditionally measured inputs of labour and capital used in production. TFP is calculated by dividing output by the weighted geometric average of labour and capital input, with the standard weighting of 0.7 for labour and 0.3 for capital. Total factor productivity is a measure of productive efficiency in that it measures how much output can be produced from a certain amount of inputs. It accounts for part of the differences in cross-country per-capita income. For relatively small percentage changes, the rate of TFP growth can be estimated by subtracting growth rates of labor and capital inputs from the growth rate of output.
Robert JamesGordon is an American economist. He is the Stanley G. Harris Professor of the Social Sciences at Northwestern University. Gordon is one of the world’s leading experts on inflation, unemployment, and long-term economic growth. His recent work asking whether U.S. economic growth is “almost over” has been widely cited, and in 2016 he was named as one of Bloomberg’s top 50 most influential people in the world.
Productivity in economics is usually measured as the ratio of what is produced to what is used in producing it. Productivity is closely related to the measure of production efficiency. A productivity model is a measurement method which is used in practice for measuring productivity. A productivity model must be able to compute Output / Input when there are many different outputs and inputs.
Bowley's law, also known as the law of the constant wage share, is a stylized fact of economics which states that the wage share of a country, i.e., the share of a country's economic output that is given to employees as compensation for their work, remains constant over time. It is named after the English economist Arthur Bowley. Research conducted near the start of the 21st century, however, found wage share to have declined since the 1980s in most major economies.
John Whitefield Kendrick was a pioneer in productivity measurement and economic accounting.
Manufacturing in the United States is a vital sector. The United States is the world's third largest manufacturer with a record high real output in Q1 2018 of $2.00 trillion well above the 2007 peak before the Great Recession of $1.95 trillion. The U.S. manufacturing industry employed 12.35 million people in December 2016 and 12.56 million in December 2017, an increase of 207,000 or 1.7%. Though still a large part of the US economy, in Q1 2018 manufacturing contributed less to GDP than the 'Finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing' sector, the 'Government' sector, or 'Professional and business services' sector.
Katharine G. Abraham is an American economist who is the director of the Maryland Center for Economics and Policy, and a professor of survey methodology and economics at the University of Maryland. She was commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1993–2001 and a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2011–2013. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Nina Pavcnik is the Niehaus Family Professor in International Studies for the Economics Department at Dartmouth College.
Carol A. Corrado is an American economist who was the former chief of industrial output at the Federal Reserve Board and currently serves as a senior advisor and research director in economics on The Conference Board. She serves as a member of the executive committee for the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER) conference on research on income and wealth. She is a senior policy scholar at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business Centre for Business and Public Policy where she focuses on economics of growth and innovation as well as fiscal and monetary policies. In addition to these positions, Corrado is involved with the American Statistical Association as well as the Technical Advisory Committee of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With the American Statistical Association Corrado serves as the chair-elect of Business and Economics.