Why we keep measuring the unmeasurable:
The political economy driving the production of international (non-)facts
Over several decades, prominent voices in economics and statistics have again and again raised serious questions about the measurement quality of trade statistics (e.g. Morgenthau 1950, Bhagwati 1964, Yeats 1993). But their calls for a more critical engagement with official statistical data have by and large gone unheard, in academic and policy-making circles alike. While the globalization and digitalization of the economy have dented concerns about measurement quality ever further (Linsi and Mügge 2019), the dominant response of the epistemic-industrial complex concerned with the analysis and management of the global economy (including academic economists, national accountants, think tanks, policy-makers and politicians) has determinedly looked the other way. Rather than engaging with concerns about the accuracy and validity of published statistics, the dominant modus of response has been to release ever more data on ever harder-to-measure dimensions of a global economy in rapid flux. This article zooms in on the political economy that has been driving this outcome. The empirical focus is on three areas of international trade statistics: “standard” merchandise trade statistics, measures of digital trade, and estimates of volumes of illicit trade. In a first step we show that even the measurement of licit trade in merchandise goods is fraught with many more complications than it is commonly acknowledged; we then proceed to argue and show that, if this is the case, the ambition to measure far more complex (digital trade) or even deliberately hidden (illicit trade) cross-border transactions becomes increasingly elusive. In the second part, we attempt to understand why we nonetheless keep measuring the unmeasurable, churning out international (non-)facts.
Project with Lukas Linsi.