In A History of National Accounting, Andre Vanoli focuses on the history of accounting in the second part of the 20th century. The book is about the relations between economic theories and the observation of the present and the past looked at from the viewpoint of economic measurement. Some parts of the book are especially devoted to the French experience in this field, but the point of view is deliberately universal. The publication is about; The birth of national accounting; The evolution of systems of accounts and accounting issues in the perspective of international harmonization; National accounts as a statistical synthesis; Concepts and their relations with economic theory; Uses and status of national accounting.

Surely everyone wants to know the source of happiness, and indeed, economists and social scientists are increasingly interested in the study and effects of subjective well-being. Putting forward a rigorous method and new data for measuring, comparing, and analyzing the relationship between well-being and the way people spend their time—across countries, demographic groups, and history—this book will help set the agenda of research and policy for decades to come. It does so by introducing a system of National Time Accounting (NTA), which relies on individuals’ own evaluations of their emotional experiences during various uses of time, a distinct departure from subjective measures such as life satisfaction and objective measures such as the Gross Domestic Product. A distinguished group of contributors here summarize the NTA method, provide illustrative findings about well-being based on NTA, and subject the approach to a rigorous conceptual and methodological critique that advances the field. As subjective well-being is topical in economics, psychology, and other social sciences, this book should have cross-disciplinary appeal.

This collection of classic articles and book chapters departs from Solow's 1957 seminal paper on the measurement of technical change. It studies the idea behind the comprehensive development of total factor productivity and the index number innovations. The volume also analyses the measurement of productivity growth and the usefulness of GDP measurement as well as perennial problems in measurement of output of certain sectors and of certain processes in an economy. With an original introduction by the editor, this is a valuable source of reference for students, researchers and practitioners.