The health crisis has highlighted the need for national accounts able to trace the activity and financial situations of various groups of economic agents as quickly as possible. It also raises several questions about how real GDP aggregates quantities of heterogeneous goods and services that meet very different needs, the relative priorities of which have been, at least temporarily, affected by the crisis. We focus on two aspects of this question: the theoretical properties of chaining volumes at market prices for the market component of GDP and the related problems of measurement and aggregation for its non-market components. Beyond the short-term shock, the crisis provides an opportunity to revisit some substantive issues regarding the interpretation of production and volume growth indicators, issues that the post-crisis period should continue to fuel.

Citation: Blanchet, D. & Fleurbaey, M. (2022). Values, Volumes, and Price-Volume Decompositions: On Some Issues Raised (Again) by the Health Crisis. Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, 532-33, 71–88.
doi: 10.24187/ecostat.2022.532.2072