'An authoritative survey with exciting new insights of special interest to economists and econometricians who analyse intertemporal and interspatial price relationships.' - Professor Angus Maddison, Groningen University This book presents a comprehensive review of recent developments in the theory and construction of index numbers using the stochastic approach, demonstrating the versatility of this approach in handling various index number problems within a single conceptual framework. It also contains a brief, but complete, review of the existing approaches to index numbers with illustrative numerical examples. The stochastic approach considers the index number problem as a signal extraction problem. The strength and reliability of the signal extracted from price and quantity changes for different commodities depends upon the messages received and the information content of the messages. The most important applications of the new approach are to be found in the context of measuring rate of inflation; fixed and chain base index numbers for temporal comparisons and for spatial intercountry comparisons; the latter generally require special index number formulae that result in transitive and base invariant comparisons.

The rapidly increasing importance of China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan both in Asia and in the world economy, represents a trend that is set to continue into the 21st century. This book provides an authoritative assessment of the 20th century performance of these countries, and in particular the factors contributing to the acceleration of Asian growth in the latter part of the century. The contributors look at Asia within a global perspective and detailed comparisons are drawn with Australia and the USA. Contributions from leading experts offer a comprehensive review of the procedures necessary to establish valid international comparisons for countries with very different economic histories and levels of development. These include methods of growth performance measurement and techniques of growth accounting. The Asian Economies in the Twentieth Century will be an indispensable new tool for policy analysts, international agencies and academic researchers.