Walter Erwin Diewert (born 1941) is a Canadian economist. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. He completed a B.A. degree in 1963, and an M.A. in mathematics in 1964, both at the University of British Columbia. He completed a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. [1] He is a professor of economics at the University of British Columbia, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1970, and also has a joint appointment at the University of New South Wales. He is also a Vice President of the Society for Economic Measurement (SEM).
He is one of the world's leading economists dealing with complex empirical issues related to the measurement of price indexes and productivity. He coauthored a reference book on the mathematics of index numbers. [2]
In a major contribution in 2012, his analysis suggested that Statistics Canada has significantly understated the growth of productivity in Canada. [3] In 2005, he received the Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics for his contributions to index number theory. [4] In 2008, he was honored as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.
Development economics is a branch of economics that deals with economic aspects of the development process in low- and middle- income countries. Its focus is not only on methods of promoting economic development, economic growth and structural change but also on improving the potential for the mass of the population, for example, through health, education and workplace conditions, whether through public or private channels.
Robert Merton Solow, GCIH was an American economist and Nobel laureate whose work on the theory of economic growth culminated in the exogenous growth model named after him.
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 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.
Agricultural economics is an applied field of economics concerned with the application of economic theory in optimizing the production and distribution of food and fiber products. Agricultural economics began as a branch of economics that specifically dealt with land usage. It focused on maximizing the crop yield while maintaining a good soil ecosystem. Throughout the 20th century the discipline expanded and the current scope of the discipline is much broader. Agricultural economics today includes a variety of applied areas, having considerable overlap with conventional economics. Agricultural economists have made substantial contributions to research in economics, econometrics, development economics, and environmental economics. Agricultural economics influences food policy, agricultural policy, and environmental policy.
Harold Hotelling was an American mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist, known for Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics, as well as Hotelling's T-squared distribution in statistics. He also developed and named the principal component analysis method widely used in finance, statistics and computer science.
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 and one of the world’s leading experts on inflation, unemployment, and long-term economic growth.
Domar aggregation is an approach to aggregating growth measures associated with industries to make larger sector or national aggregate growth rates. The issue comes up in the context of national accounts and multifactor productivity (MFP) statistics.
The Malmquist Index (MI) is a bilateral index that can be used to compare the production technology of two economies. It is named after Professor Sten Malmquist, on whose ideas it is based. It is also called the Malmquist Productivity Index.
Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was an American economist who served as the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University. An influential econometric scholar, he was famed for his work on the relationship between productivity and economic growth, the economics of climate change, and the intersection between economics and statistics. Described as a "master" of his field, he received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1971, and was described as a worthy contender for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Profit, in accounting, is an income distributed to the owner in a profitable market production process (business). Profit is a measure of profitability which is the owner's major interest in the income-formation process of market production. There are several profit measures in common use.
The Vancouver School of Economics is a school of the University of British Columbia located in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The school ranks as one of the top 25 in the world and top in Canada. The school exhibits research activity and offers undergraduate and graduate degrees.
The Society for Economic Measurement, or SEM, is a scientific learned society in the field of economics. It was founded on August 24, 2013 by William A. Barnett in order to "promote research on economic measurement, using advanced tools from economic theory, econometrics, aggregation theory, experimental economics, mathematics, and statistics". Nobel Laureate Apostolos Serletis took over as the society's second president in 2019. In 2024, Gaetano Antinolfi became the third and current president of the society. The goal of the SEM is to promote in economics—given the constraints of a social science—the implementation of the strict rules of measurement and data gathering standards used in the physical sciences. Carnegie Mellon University, the Center for Financial Stability, and the University of Kansas are sponsors of the society.
Bruno D. Zumbo is a Canadian mathematical scientist trained in the tradition of research that combines pure and applied mathematics with statistical and algorithmic techniques to develop theory and solve problems arising in measurement, testing, and surveys in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. He is currently Professor and Distinguished University Scholar, the Canada Research Chair in Psychometrics and Measurement, and the Paragon UBC Professor of Psychometrics & Measurement at University of British Columbia.
Beatrice N. Vaccara was an American economist and economic statistician who worked for the United States Department of Commerce as head of the Bureau of Industrial Economics.
Michael James Farrell, was a Cambridge economist professionally known as M. J. Farrell. Academically he is remembered largely for the celebrated parametric measure of productive efficiency that he published in 1957.
Alice Orcutt Nakamura is an American-Canadian economist and writer. She is a fellow of the Canadian Economics Association, which is the highest honour of the association. She is currently a professor of finance and management science at the University of Alberta where she has taught since 1972. Alice Nakamura was also the first female president of the Canadian Economics Association in 1994–1995. She was also the president of the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth from 2014 to 2016.
Angela Redish is a professor of economics at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and the acting President of the Canadian Economics Association. From 2001 to 2006, Redish served as the Head of Department of Economics at the University of British Columbia and was awarded The President's Medal of Excellence by the University of British Columbia in 2018 for her contributions towards establishing the Vancouver School of Economics.
Siwan Anderson is a Canadian economist and professor at the Vancouver School of Economics (VSE) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her area of focus is on development economics with a micro-level approach focusing on institutions in developing countries, and also gender economics focusing on the role of women in the economy. Siwan Anderson is also an Associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), an Associate of the Theoretical Research in Development Economics (ThReD), a Fellow of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and a Faculty Associate of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA). Siwan Anderson is the first woman to receive the John Rae Prize from the Canadian Economics Association.
Robert Christopher Feenstra is an American economist, academic and author. He is the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Chair in International Economics at University of California, Davis. He served as the director of the International Trade and Investment Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1992 to 2016. He also served as Associate Dean in the Social Sciences at the University of California, Davis from 2014 to 2019.