Tag Archives: GDP

Skewering Patrick Minford has become something of an economists' bloodsport. I admit, I have done my fair share of Minford-bashing, though I do try to stay away from trade economics. Others are much better at lampooning Minford's antediluvian approach to trade economics than me.But when Minford starts pontificating on the effect of currency movements on the balance of trade, I can't resist getting out the shotgun. Minford is appallingly bad on anything that involves foreign exchange. He just...

What we need is to disaggregate growth and report on the progress of all Americans. Instead of the one-number-fits-all approach of GDP growth, this new system would report growth for Americans along the income curve, much as the graphs above do. It might indicate, for example, that the bottom 50 percent of Americans experienced growth of 1.3 percent while Americans in the top 1 percent of earners experienced 4.5 percent income growth. Unfortunately, such a system is not currently possible....

Conventional economics prioritizes "growth" measured chiefly by per capita real GDP, assuming that increasing per capita real GDP increases the standard of living of a society. However, per capita real GDP is not a metric of the standard of living since it does not include distribution. They becomes crucial as inequality of income and net worth increases. A small segment of the population can be getting better off, while most of the society either languishes or declines. The typical...

GDP's inventor Simon Kuznets was adamant that his measure had nothing to do with wellbeing. But too often we confuse the two. For seven decades, gross domestic product has been the global elite’s go-to number. Fast growth, as measured by GDP, has been considered a mark of success in its own right, rather than as a means to an end, no matter how the fruits of that growth are invested or shared. If something has to be sacrificed to get GDP growth moving, whether it be clean air, public...

PRIME (Policy Research in Macroeconomics) economists were asked by the FT “How fast do you think the UK economy will grow in 2018 and how will this compare to other countries?” (See here: https://www.ft.com/content/ceb165ee-ebb5-11e7-bd17-521324c81e23) We replied as follows: The end of 2017 witnessed, in our view, the top of the global asset bubble. Rupert Murdoch’s decision to dispose of 21st Century Fox was a clear indication that the bubble had peaked. Bitcoin’s stratospheric rise...

Ah, productivity. Who knew that our whole prosperity was totally dependent on a concept as nebulous as this?To be sure, it doesn't sound nebulous. It is output per worker per hour. What is so difficult about that?The problem is how you define "output". Usually, we take this to mean GDP (gross domestic product), though we might use GNP (gross national product) or GVA (gross value added). In this post, I shall use GDP.As Diane Coyle has engagingly written, GDP is a deeply flawed measure....

According to fresh figures from the IMF (October 24), Russia’s GDP is expected to exceed $4 trillion first time ever. By this measure, Russia is the 6th largest economy in the world, virtually on par with Germany, who scored $4.15 trillion. At the same time, China has solidified its position as the world’s indisputably largest economy. With its $23 trillion, China’s economy is already bigger 1/5th than the U.S. economy with its $19 trillion [based on PPP].... Emerging countries, and not...

The ONS's latest flash productivity estimate is rather good. Productivity in Quarter 3 2017 was up by 0.9% on the previous quarter. Here's what ONS has to say about it: Output per hour growth in Quarter 3 2017 was the result of a 0.4% increase in gross value added (GVA) (using the preliminary gross domestic product (GDP) estimate) accompanied by a 0.5% fall in total hours worked (using the latest Labour Force Survey data). This fall in total hours was driven primarily by a 0.5% fall in...

On the evening of Friday, September 22nd, the credit ratings agency Moody's downgraded the UK's credit rating. Admittedly, it was only by one notch. But coming as it did hard on the heels of Theresa May's grand speechin Florence, it was a shattering blow.  Credit ratings agencies lost much of their lustre in the financial crisis of 2008, when they were revealed to have been complicit in the mispricing of complex financial derivatives – the “toxic waste” that brought down some of the...

A graph that shows, for a longer span, essentially the same information presented in Robert Allen's graph of manufacturing production, and discussed before here. It is evident that the rise of China (India is not quite yet visible, even if its share did increase) represents a certain rebalancing, which is inevitable as the income per capita grows in that country, even if it does not scape what mainstream economists refer to as the middle income trap. Source here, and the data is, as...