THE MACROECONOMIC PERFORMANCE OF NATIONS MEASUREMENT AND PERCEPTION

Abstract

It is common practice to summarise the economic performance of countries in terms of four dimensions (real growth, inflation, unemployment and the external account), which are visually captured by the magic diamond of the OECD. In this paper we present a synthetic performance measure which merges the four separate indicators into one single statistic. The relative importance of each indicator, representing another macroeconomic objective, may vary across countries and over different subperiods. Therefore we want to construct an indicator which allows unequal weighting of its components, using a data envelopment analysis (DEA)-inspired linear programming model which exhibits `benefit of the doubt weighting'.