GDP

Introduction The scale and servicing cost of government debt are both rising. This will increase the amount of money that governments will have to suck out of economies over the…

Knowledge has now become a capital investment and no longer a cost of producing goods. This change has been announced by Brent Moulton, head of national accounts at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), on April 22nd, 2013. This will change the way gross domestic products are calculated. It will lead to an immediate 3% growth in the United States’ GDP.

No, this is not a joke, but one of the suggestions of the very serious and very official report that the French President Sarkozy commissioned to the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Indeed, according to the figures presented by the headed by Stiglitz Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, the traditional disposable income measure, which estimates income per capita in France to be only 66% of income in the US, is inadequate.

It is a common statement today that in our modern societies we care too much about growth and need another intellectual framework that can guide policies and populations to more worthwhile values and sustainability. Johan Norberg is critically examining some of the alternatives to the traditional development indicator, the Gross Domestic Product growth.