The World Needs Better Balance Sheets

Around 300 million companies worldwide connected by an estimated 13 billion supply links now face uncertainty.

Around four-fifths of the output of advanced economies has been designated by economists as “hard to measure’s growth and productivity.

A disproportionate focus on easier-to-measure industries such as manufacturing underestimates the importance of the industries actually powering the modern economy.

Traditional economic statistics were not designed for this complex network of interdependencies.

Lack of reliable measurements on the supply side of the economy has made it difficult to capture the patterns and condition of global production chains even in calmer times.

Statistics cannot agree on how to record the value of widely used free digital services such as open-source software.

Much of the underlying data already exists or could be collected, from the payment and tax numbers needed to track global production networks, to employers’ payroll figures, and the many new sources of sensor and satellite data.

Pilot data initiatives such as the Anthropic Economic Index can help statisticians track the adoption and use of artificial intelligence across society.