The Measurement of Growth Rates From Time Series

Abstract

Growth rates are commonly used as summaries of trends in time series data. Productivity indexes, price indexes and output series are usually discussed in terms of the changing growth rates over various periods of time. Policy decisions are often based on such growth rate estimates. However, there are several techniques for measuring growth rates and depending on the nature and structure of the data, each may provide a different result. The problems of traditional measures of growth rates are discussed and some new measures and their merits are also presented. An empirical example shows the potential problems associated with some growth rate measures and presents some solutions.