From: Donald Weightman <dweightman@radix.net>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 04:58:52 +0800
To: e$cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Where to find some papers on the the information economy?
Message-ID: <199610011522.LAA28496@news1.radix.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


The "World Economy Survey" in the Current ECONOMIST makes some interesting
points about the intractabilty of the information-based economy to
traditional manufacturing-based econometrics, which looks at things like
industrial outputs as the basis for forecasting, and, not least,
macroeconomic policy. The gist of it is that the older measures overweight
the more traditional transactions -- production & sale of widgets and ingots
-- and undercount digital economic activity -- writing code, for example --
because no one knows how to measure the latter.

The implications for the political control of cybercommerce are pretty
striking -- how can a government control -- using the traditional blunt
instruments like fiscal and monetary policy -- sectors it cannot see,
measure, or quantify?

Anyway, the ECONOMIST Survey cites a couple of papers I'd like to see:

Charles Goldfinger; "The Intangible Economy and its Implications for
Statistics and Statisticians". Eurostat -- ISTAT seminar, Bologna, Feb. 1996

Danny Quah; "The Invisible Hand and the Weightless Economy". LSE Centre for
Economic Performance,  occasional paper No. 12, April 1996.

I ran some Web searches with null results. Does anyone know how I can get
these quickly?

Thanks, and apologies if the cross-posting is burdensome.

Don Weightman
dweightman@radix.net