Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Muncho and with me as a Zanemunshank and Jack

Smith. Today we would like to talk about how we measure things. This is not a discussion about

statistics itself, but it's a discussion about the politics of statistics, about how the things

we measure impact political decisions we take.

And it's not only about the technical aspects of the measurements taken,

but even the concepts of the measurement themselves.

And there are measures that we've taken for granted for many years,

like the measurement of our economies in some dollar GDP or productivity measures.

Susanna, you wrote about productivity today in France.

There's a debate in France about productivity growth in connection with the pension system.

Productivity is a concept we don't understand very well, and yet it has a huge implications,

this case in France and on French

politics. Yeah, I never have seen such a vigorous debate about productivity in the media,

neither in France nor in other countries. So productivity is a difficult measure. I mean,

there's various concepts. It's an implicit measure and you have to approximate. It's a little bit like inflation.

We know what it is, but yet we don't really know how to measure it best. So we have approximations

to what we want to measure. And each of the concepts has is pros and cons. My preferred

ones is output for working hour. So it basically measures the capacity of an industry

or of an economy to produce output in whatever form, either services or manufacturing per working

hour by the population that is actively in work. There's lots of implicit assumptions about capital market deepening

and how the service sector is functioning,

what the administrative burdens take away from that output, etc.

...