Measure Up: A Better Way to Calculate GDP

International Review of Economics, 2014

OECD Statistics Working Papers, 2015

The OECD Statistics Working Paper Seriesmanaged by the OECD Statistics Directorateis designed to make available in a timely fashion and to a wider readership selected studies prepared by OECD staff or by outside consultants working on OECD projects. The papers included are of a technical, methodological or statistical policy nature and relate to statistical work relevant to the Organisation. The Working Papers are generally available only in their original language-English or Frenchwith a summary in the other. OECD Working Papers should not be reported as representing the official views of the OECD or of its member countries. The opinions expressed and arguments employed are those of the author. Working Papers describe preliminary results or research in progress by the author and are published to stimulate discussion on a broad range of issues on which the OECD works. Comments on Working Papers are welcomed, and may be sent to the Statistics Directorate, OECD, 2 rue André-Pascal,

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2008

This article provides a broad overview of the measurement techniques used in estimating GDP and the national accounts in the United States. In the United States, the GDP and the national accounts estimates are fundamentally based on detailed economic census data and other information that is available only once every five years. The challenge lies in developing a framework and methods that take these economic census data and combine them using a mosaic of monthly, quarterly, and annual economic indicators to produce quarterly and annual GDP estimates. One problem is that the other economic indicators that are used to extrapolate GDP in between the five-year economic census data—such as retail sales, housing starts, and manufacturers shipments of capital goods— are often collected for purposes other than estimating GDP and may embody definitions that differ from those used in the national accounts. Another problem is some data are simply not available for the earlier estimates in the...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is, most certainly, an important yardstick for the economic performance of a country. Economists, policy makers, and central banks use GDP to gauge the health of the economy and direct fiscal and monetary policies to boost it. GDP, along with unemployment rate, are some of the most popular metrics discussed in newspapers and on cable news. Political pundits and lobbyists use GDP to buttress positions, especially on immigration.

2011

This ESDN Quarterly Report (QR) is a direct follow-up of the 6 ESDN Workshop in Berlin in early December 2010. It provides an overview of the various measurement approaches in the current “beyond GDP” debate that aim at measuring societal progress with more comprehensive indicators than the economic progress-oriented approaches. The aim of the QR report is to provide an overview of the debate at the conceptual and political level in the measurement initiatives in going “beyond GDP” as well as to outline the challenges ahead in the reforms towards measuring social progress. The QR is mainly based on the ESDN Case Studies No.3 and No.4, the background paper and discussions at the 6 ESDN Workshop in Berlin in December 2010 as well as the report summarising the debates at the workshop.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Gross domestic product's high correlation with unemployment and infl ation makes it a key measure of the U.S. economy. Yet the somewhat arbitrary nature of the GDP construction process complicates interpretation and measurement of the indicator. A study of an alternative measure of GDP designed to address the published series' limitations fi nds that the adjusted measure differs in its representation of the long-term trend-but not the short-term fl uctuations-of GDP. The published series' relevance as an indicator is therefore robust to some of the arbitrariness of its construction. a See Landefeld, Seskin, and Fraumeni (2008) for a brief history of the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts.

Channel News Asia, 2019

Nobel Prize winner Simon Kuznets, widely credited for proposing the idea of GDP decades ago, noted GDP considers only economic production and not human well-being. Sadly, people routinely conflate the two, with troubling consequences that focus on economic outputs to the detriment of social and environmental issues. Take United States. During 2008–2019, it has the longest period of economic expansion in history. Despite this growth, it is now experiencing highest levels of economic inequality in 50 years, enduring a prolonged opioid crisis, increasing suicide rates, and declining lifespans for many sectors of society. Winners of GDP horse race attract foreign investment and command greater geopolitical attention. In India, Narendra Modi rode to power promising higher GDP growth. Its 7% GDP growth rate was later said by its former Chief Economic Advisor to be an overestimate by 2%. China is facing similar questions of its quality of economic development and overestimation of its GDP growth. See our views on GDP and importance of complementing it with other substantive indices on #sustainability and #social and #environmental progress. See our analysis.

The objective of this article is to demonstrate the need to abandon the calculation of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) that computes all the financial movements of a country or region whether or not they are beneficial to the population, a fact that imposes the need for their replacement by another economic indicator.