A Welfare‐Based Approach to Aggregating Growth Rates across Countries*
提出一种基于福利的跨国人均GDP增长率加总方法，克服传统方法对汇率敏感、权重不归一等问题，并应用于33个发展中国家和5个区域集团的数据分析。
Abstract. Aggregating per capita gross domestic product growth across countries has always been a technical problem because of the complexities in the relative movements of exchange rates, economic output and populations. As such, the conventional approach to aggregating growth across countries suffers from sensitivity to exchange rates, as well as from the possibility of aggregate growth rates not being convex combinations of individual growth rates. This article introduces a new methodology in aggregating per capita growth rates that does not suffer from the drawbacks of the conventional approach. Using a welfare‐based approach, it is shown that the proposed methodology is robust w.r.t. exchange rates and generates weights that always add up to unity, thus avoiding the anomalies that are inherent in the conventional approach. The methodology proposed in the article is applied to calculate aggregate growth rates of 33 developing member countries as well as five regional groupings, and the results are compared with those arising from the conventional approach. A number of insights arise that were previously hidden or inaccessible.