Canada

Whatever the problems with the old definitions, and they are numerous, they remain the way the national accounts are published in OECD countries.

But so are too the conventions of generally accepted accounting principles for financial accounting.

These are the way our data sources are framed so to do meaningful data analysis and interpretation we have to know them.

Business schools are not immune or exempt from understanding where the data comes from and how it’s constructed. Any good business school in whatever tradition will make sure its students understand that at least.

It’s one thing be such a pedant as to make students switch from conventional and do basic microeconomics with the P and Q axes reversed (as they logically should be), just to correct a deeply embedded error in the history of economic practice - and there are profs out there who do that.

It’s another thing to be insistent on what is actually in a measure that calls itself ‘labour productivity’ and is used by uninformed or deliberately misleading business press in Canada to beat on the labour force itself when the structural issues are completely different.

It would be worth discussing if the business press didn’t constantly misinterpret the meaning of measure.