美智库悲惨指数：香港不如中国大陆和台湾

choi

BBC Chinese, May 1, 2014
www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/simp/worl ... sery_index_hk.shtml
("美国智库卡托研究所（Cato Institute）日前公布2013 '悲惨指数' * * * 世界上最 '悲惨' 的国家是委内瑞拉 * * *  悲惨指数（misery index）的计算是将通胀率、借贷利率和失业率相加，再减去同期人均GDP增长率而得出的")

My comment:
(a) The report is based on

Steve H Hanke, Measuring Misery around the World. Globe Asia, May 2014.
www.cato.org/publications/commen ... misery-around-world

Quote:

(i) "The late Arthur Okun, a distinguished economist who served as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during President Johnson’s administration, developed the original misery index for the United States. Okun’s index is equal to the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates. Harvard Professor Robert Barro amended the misery index by also including the 30-year government bond yield [for US; US has 30-year Treasury bond, but most other nations do not] and the output gap for real GDP.

(ii) "This type of analysis is not limited to the United States. The misery index concept can be applied to any country where suitable data exist. A misery index — a simple sum of inflation, lending rates, and unemployment rates, minus year-on-year per capita GDP growth — is used to construct a ranking for 90 countries.

(iii) "When price controls and shortages prevail, how do we measure the true rate of inflation — "open" inflation?

"Binding price controls spawn black markets. Many of the goods and services subject to controls migrate to black markets. For example, in German-occupied Poland during World War II, price controls prevailed and the black market flourished. Everything from basic food and industrial goods to foreign exchange traded on black markets. There was even an illegal stock market. The scale of the black markets was impressive, with 80% of all food being supplied via illegal markets.

"One way to estimate the rate of true, open inflation, in cases such as Venezuela’s, would be to track down the free-market prices — including the black-market prices — for all goods in the official basket. But such a procedure would be very difficult, if not virtually impossible, to implement. That is why no country has ever accomplished such a herculean task.

"As an alternative, I have developed a procedure for estimating the true, open inflation rate for an economy in the grip of high inflation and price controls. While it is impractical to determine the free-market (read: black-market) prices for all items in an official basket, it is often quite easy to observe the free, black-market exchange rate. Since this is the most important price in the economy, changes in the free, black-market exchange rate can be used to estimate the true, open inflation rate for an economy.

"By using the most important free-market price in Venezuela — the black — market bolivar / U. S. dollar rate — we can accurately estimate Venezuela’s annual open inflation rate (see the accompanying chart).

(b) Arthur Melvin Okun
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Melvin_Okun
(1928-1980)
(c) In quotation (ii) , "minus" year-on-year per capita GDP?  Why?  It has got to be minus, not "plus"--because the higher real GDP (where "real" in economics means subtraction from inflation rate) growth, the less miserable--suppose distribution of the wealth is relatively even and widespread.
(d) Do not lose sight of the big picture. BBC does not mention it, but Taiwan is No 88--the third from the bottom (which is Japan as No 90, the least miserable in the survey, and accounting for the fact that Japanese are quite content about their fate). Hong Kong is No 76 whereas US, No 71. Thus Hong Kong as well as China--Macao not in the Table--fares quite well.