NB! Effort has been made to faithfully produce these notes.

Nevertheless, they should not be considered free of mistakes. Hence, any noted errors will be corrected upon notification.

Gross domestic product The GDP of a country is defined as the market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. Until the 1980s the term GNP or gross national product was used. The two terms GDP and GNP are almost identical. The most common approach to measuring and understanding GDP is the expenditure method: GDP = consumption + investment + government spending + (exports imports) "Gross" means depreciation of capital stock is not included. With depreciation, with net investment instead of gross investment, it is the Net domestic product. Consumption and investment in this equation are the expenditure on final goods and services. The exports minus imports part of the equation (often called cumulative exports) then adjusts this by subtracting the part of this expenditure not produced domestically (the imports), and adding back in domestic production not consumed at home (the exports). Economists, since Keynes have preferred to split the general consumption term into two parts; private consumption, and public sector or government spending. Two advantages of dividing total consumption this way in theoretical macroeconomics are: Private consumption is a central concern of welfare economics. The private investment and trade portions of the economy are ultimately directed (in mainstream economic models) to increases in long-term private consumption. If separated from endogenous private consumption, government consumption can be treated as exogenous, so that different government spending levels can be considered within a meaningful macroeconomic framework. Therefore GDP can be expressed as: GDP = private consumption + government + investment + net exports (or simply GDP = C + G + I + X - M (X - M accounts for exports - imports)

The components of GDP Each of the variables C, I, G, and NX: C is private consumption (or Consumer expenditures) in the economy. This includes most personal expenditures of households such as food, rent, medical expenses and so on. I is defined as business investments in capital. Examples of investment by a business include construction of a new mine, purchase of software, or purchase of machinery and equipment for a factory. 'Investment' in GDP is meant very specifically as non-financial product purchases. Buying financial products is classed as saving in macroeconomics, as opposed to investment. G is the sum of government expenditures on final goods and services. It includes salaries of public servants, purchase of weapons for the military, and any investment expenditure by a government. It does not include any transfer payments, such as social security or unemployment benefits. The relative size of government expenditure compared to GDP as a whole is critical in the theory of crowding out.

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NB! Effort has been made to faithfully produce these notes. Nevertheless, they should not be considered free of mistakes. Hence, any noted errors will be corrected upon notification.

NX are "net exports" in the economy (gross exports - gross imports; also (X-M)). GDP captures the amount a country produces, including goods and services produced for overseas consumption, therefore exports are added. Imports are subtracted since imported goods will be included in the terms G, I, or C, and must be deducted to avoid counting foreign supply as domestic.

Read national accounts. Examples of GDP component variables Examples of C, I, G, & NX: If you spend money to renovate your hotel so that occupancy rates increase, that is private investment, but if you buy shares in a consortium to do the same thing it is saving. The former is included when measuring GDP (in I), the latter is not. However, when the consortium conducted its own expenditure on renovation, that expenditure would be included in GDP. If the hotel is your private home your renovation spending would be measured as Consumption, but if a government agency is converting the hotel into an office for civil servants the renovation spending would be measured as part of public sector spending (G). If the renovation involves the purchase of a painting from abroad, that spending would also be counted as an increase in imports, so that NX would fall and the total GDP is unaffected by the purchase. GDP is intended to measure domestic production rather than total consumption or spending. If you are paid to paint the painting to hang in a foreign hotel the situation would be reversed, and the payment you receive would be counted in NX (positively, as an export). Again, we see that GDP is attempting to measure production through the means of expenditure; if the painting you produced had been bought domestically it would have been included in the GDP figures (in C or I) when purchased by a consumer or a business, but because it was exported it is necessary to 'correct' the amount consumed domestically to give the amount produced domestically.

Difference from aggregate expenditure An alternative measure of the economy to GDP is the aggregate expenditure measure, which is identical to GDP except that it excludes items produced but not purchased (net inventory / stock level growth). If the economy produces more goods than are sold, the increase in inventory would generally be included in the GDP figure (as "Investment"). GDP counts these changes in inventory levels as investment.

The GDP income account Another way of measuring GDP is to measure the total income payable in the GDP income accounts. This should provide the same figure as the expenditure method described above. The formula for GDP measured using the income approach, called GDP (I), which is:

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NB! Effort has been made to faithfully produce these notes. Nevertheless, they should not be considered free of mistakes. Hence, any noted errors will be corrected upon notification.

GDP = Compensation of employees + Gross operating surplus + Gross mixed income + Taxes less subsidies on production and imports Compensation of employees (COE) measures the total remuneration to employees for work done. It includes wages and salaries, as well as employer contributions to the national social security fund and other such programmes. Gross operating surplus (GOS) is the surplus due to owners of incorporated businesses, often called profits. Gross mixed income (GMI) is the same measure as GOS, but for unincorporated businesses, this often includes most small businesses. The sum of COE, GOS and GMI is called total factor income, and measures the value of GDP at factor (basic) prices. The difference between basic prices and final prices, that is those used in the expenditure calculation, is the total taxes and subsidies that the Government has levied or paid on that production. Hence, adding taxes less subsidies on production and imports changes GDP at factor cost to GDP (I). Another formula can be written as this: GDP = R + I + P + SA + W R = rents I = interests P = profits SA = statistical adjustments (corporate income taxes, dividends, undistributed corporate profits) W = wages

Measurement International standards The international standard for measuring GDP is contained in the book System of National Accounts (1993), which was prepared by representatives of the International Monetary Fund, European Union, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, United Nations and World Bank. The publication is normally referred to as SNA93, to distinguish it from the previous edition published in 1968, usually written as SNA68. SNA93 sets out a set of rules and procedures for the measurement of national accounts. The standards are designed to be flexible, to allow for differences in local statistical needs and conditions.

National measurement Within each country GDP is usually measured by a national government statistical agency, as private sector organisations normally do not have access to the information required, especially information on expenditure and production by governments. Some of these agencies are: Kenya: Austria: Canada:
Gross domestic product

www.cbs.go.ke Statistik Austria. Statistics Canada (StatCan).

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Pakistan: Russia: United Kingdom: United States:

http://www.statpak.gov.pk/depts/fbs/statistics/national_accounts/national_accounts.html Federal State Statistics Service Office for National Statistics Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

GDP can measure spending on all goods and services. GDP can also measure all income earned.

Interest rates Net interest expense is a transfer payment in all sectors except the financial sector. Net interest expenses in the financial sector is seen as production and value added and is added to GDP.

Cross-border comparison The level of GDP in different countries may be compared by converting their value in national currency according to either Current currency exchange rate:- GDP calculated by exchange rates prevailing on international currency markets Purchasing power parity exchange rate: - GDP calculated by purchasing power parity (PPP) of each currency relative to a selected standard, frequently the United States dollar. The relative ranking of countries may differ dramatically between the two approaches. The current exchange rate method converts the value of goods and services using global currency exchange rates. This can offer better indications of a country's international purchasing power and relative economic strength. For instance, if 10% of GDP is being spent on buying hi-tech foreign arms, the number of weapons purchased is entirely governed by current exchange rates, since arms are a traded product bought on the international market. The purchasing power parity method accounts for the relative effective domestic purchasing power of the average producer or consumer within an economy. This can be a better indicator of the living standards of less-developed countries because it compensates for the weakness of local currencies in world markets. The PPP method of GDP conversion is most relevant to non-traded goods and services. There is a clear pattern of the purchasing power parity method decreasing the disparity in GDP between high and low income (GDP) countries, as compared to the current exchange rate method. This finding is called the Penn effect.

Penn effect The Penn effect is the economic finding that real income ratios between high and low income countries are systematically exaggerated by GDP conversion at market exchange rates. It has been a consistent econometric result for at least 50 years.
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The "Balassa-Samuelson effect" is a model cited as the principal cause of the Penn effect by neo-classical economics, as well as being a synonym of "Penn effect".

History Classical economics made simple predictions about exchange rates; it was said that a basket of goods would cost roughly the same amount everywhere in the world, when paid for in some common currency (like gold). This is called the purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis, also expressed as saying that the real exchange rate (RER) between goods in various countries should be close to one. Fluctuations over time were expected by this theory but were predicted to be very small and non-systematic. Before, 1940s, the PPP hypothesis found econometric support, but some time after the 2nd World War the pattern changed, and the Penn study was the first to identify a modern trend; countries with higher incomes consistently had higher prices as measured by comparable price indices. In 1964 the modern theoretical interpretation was set down as the Balassa-Samuelson effect, with studies since then consistently confirming the original Penn effect. However, subsequent analysis has provided many other mechanisms through which the Penn effect can arise, and historical cases where it is expected, but not found. Up until 1994 the PPP-deviation tended to be known as the "Balassa-Samuelson effect", but in his review of progress "Facets of Balassa-Samuelson Thirty Years Later" Paul Samuelson acknowledged the debt that his theory owed to the ICP/PWT data-gatherers, by coining the term "Penn effect" to describe the "basic fact" they uncovered, when he wrote: "The Penn effect is an important phenomenon of actual history, but not an inevitable fact of life."

Understanding the Penn effect Most things are cheaper in poor or low income countries than in rich ones. Someone from a developed country on vacation in a developing country will usually find their money going a lot further abroad than at home. For instance, the same Big Mac or hamburger cost $5.46 in Switzerland, and $1.49 in Russia in December 2005, at the prevailing USD exchange rate into the local currencies. To avoid confusion arising from money prices the nominal exchange rates are usually ignored, with only the 'real exchange rate' (RER) being considered. (Here, 3.66 Russian meals to one Swiss.)

The effect's challenge to simple open economy models Open economy An open economy is an economy in which people, including businesses, can trade in goods and services with other people and businesses in the international community at large. This contrasts with a closed economy in which international trade cannot take place.
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The act of selling goods or services to a foreign country is called exporting. The act of buying goods or services from a foreign country is called importing. Together exporting and importing are collectively called international trade. There are a number of advantages for citizens of a country with an open economy. One primary advantage is that the citizen consumers have a much larger variety of goods and services from which to choose from. As well consumers have an opportunity to invest their savings outside of the country. Economic models of an open economy The basic model The basic economic model of an open economy is the same as that of a closed economy model except two new terms are added: Exports (EX) and imports (IM): Y = Cd + Id + Gd + (EX IM) With Y being gross domestic product / national income, Cd is consumer consumption of domestic goods and services, Id is investment in domestic goods and services, Gd is government expenditures on domestic goods and services. The term (EX IM) is usually called net exports and is sometimes designated with the term NX. The purchasing power parity hypothesis argues that the Balassa-Samuelson effect shouldn't occur. A simple economic model treating hamburger as commodity goods implies that international price competition will force Swiss and Russian burger prices to converge on the $3 U.S. price. The Penn effect denies this convergence; it is clear evidence that the general price level is much higher where (dollar) incomes are high, with no tendency to match the cheaper prices in poorer countries.

How identical products can be sold at consistently different prices in different places The law of one price says that the same item cannot sustain two different sale prices in the same market, due to the fact that everyone would buy only at the lower price. By reversing this law, we can infer that different countries do not share an efficient common market from the fact that prices for the same good are different.

The price level Measuring 'the' price level involves looking at goods other than burgers, but most goods in a price index (CPI) show the same pattern; equivalent things tend to cost more in high income countries. Most services, perishable goods like the hamburger, and housing cannot be purchased very far from the point of consumption. These items form the typical consumer shopping list, and therefore the CPI level can vary from country to country, just like the burger price.

The international development implications The PPP-deviation allows rural Indians to survive on an income below the absolute subsistence level in the rich world. If the money income levels are taken as given, then ceteris paribus, the Penn effect is a very good
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thing. If it did not apply, millions of the world's poorest people would find that their income was below the survival edge. However, the effect implies that the money income level disparity as measured by international exchange rates is a fantasy, because these exchange rates only apply to traded goods, a small proportion of consumption.

GDP and standard of living GDP per capita is often used as an indicator of standard of living in an economy. While this approach has advantages, many criticisms of GDP focus on its use as an indicator of standard of living. The major advantages to using GDP per capita as an indicator of standard of living are that it is measured frequently, widely and consistently; frequently in that most countries provide information on GDP on a quarterly basis, which allows a user to spot trends more quickly, widely in that some measure of GDP is available for practically every country in the world, allowing crude comparisons between the standard of living in different countries, and consistently in that the technical definitions used within GDP are relatively consistent between countries, and so there can be confidence that the same thing is being measured in each country. The major disadvantage of using GDP as an indicator of standard of living is that it is not, strictly speaking, a measure of standard of living. GDP is intended to be a measure of particular types of economic activity within a country. Nothing about the definition of GDP suggests that it is necessarily a measure of standard of living. For instance, in an extreme example, a country which exported 100 per cent of its production would still have a high GDP, but a very poor standard of living, because someone else is enjoying the sweat of that economy. The argument in favour of using GDP is not that it is a good indicator of standard of living, but rather that, all other things being equal, standard of living tends to increase when GDP per capita increases. This makes GDP a proxy (substitute) for standard of living, rather than a direct measure of it. There are a number of controversies (disparity) about this use of GDP.

Criticisms and limitations GDP is widely used by economists in analysing the trend of an economy is moving, as its variations are relatively quicker to identify. However, its value as an indicator for the standard of living is considered to be limited. An alternative for this purpose is the United Nations' Human Development Index in which the GDP is a contributing factor in its calculation.

Human Development Index The UN Human Development Index (HDI) is a comparative measure of poverty, literacy, education, life expectancy, childbirth, and other factors for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring wellbeing, especially child welfare. It is used by many people to distinguish whether the country is a developed,
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developing, or under developed country. The index was developed in 1990 by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, and has been used since 1993 by the United Nations Development Programme in its annual Human Development Report. The HDI measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development: A long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth. Knowledge, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weight) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio (with one-third weight). A decent standard of living, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) in USD. Each year, UN member states are listed and ranked according to these measures. Those high on the list often use it to attracting talented immigrants. The report for 2005 shows that, in general, the HDI for countries around the world is improving, with two major exceptions: Post-Soviet states, and Sub-Saharan Africa, both of which show steady decline. Worsening education, economies, and mortality rates have contributed to HDI declines amongst countries in the first group, while HIV/AIDS and concomitant mortality is the principal cause of decline in the second group.

Criticisms of how the GDP is used include: GDP does not take into account the black market, where the money spent isn't registered, and the nonmonetary economy, where no money comes into play at all, resulting in inaccurate or abnormally low GDP figures. For example, in countries with major business transactions occurring informally, portions of local economy are not easily registered. Bartering may be more prominent than the use of money, even extending to services such as I assisted you build your house ten years ago, so now you assist me. This mainstream economic analysis ignores the environment, subsistence production and domestic work. The current system counts oil spills and wars as contributors to economic growth, while child-rearing and housekeeping are considered valueless. The work of New Zealand economist, Marilyn Waring, has highlighted that if a concerted attempt to factor in unpaid work were made, then it would in part, undo the injustices of unpaid labour, and provide the political transparency and accountability necessary for democracy. It ignores volunteer, unpaid work. For example, Linux contributes nothing to GDP, but it was estimated that it would have cost more than a billion US dollars for a commercial company to develop. Often different calculations of GDP are confused among each other. For cross-border comparisons one should especially check whether it is calculated by purchasing power parity (PPP) or current exchange rate method. GDP counts work that produces no net change or that results from repairing harm. For example, rebuilding after a natural disaster or war may produce a considerable amount of economic activity and thus boost GDP, but it would have been far better if the disaster had never occurred in the first place. The economic value of health care is another classic example - it may raise GDP if many people are sick and they are receiving
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expensive treatment, but it is not a desirable situation, because they might not even be producing anything, they are only consuming. Alternative economic measures, such as the standard of living or discretionary income per capita better measure the human utility of economic activity. Quality of life - human happiness - is determined by many other things than physical goods and services. Even the alternative economic measures of standard of living and discretionary income do not take these factors into account. As the single most important figure in statistics it is subject to fraud, such as the usage of hedonic price indexing on official GDP numbers in the US, thereby creating investments out of nothing while statistically dampening inflation. Cross border trade within companies distorts the GDP and is done frequently to escape high taxation. Examples include the German EBay that evades German tax by doing business in Switzerland, and American companies that have founded holdings in Kenya to "buy" their own products for cheap from their continental factories without shipping and selling them for profit via Kenya (AGOA), thereby reducing their taxes and increasing Kenyan GDP. People may buy cheap, low-durability goods over and over again, or they may buy high-durability goods less often. It is possible that the monetary value of the items sold in the first case is higher than that in the second case, in which case a higher GDP is simply the result of greater inefficiency and waste, as is evident in the United States. This is not always the case; durable goods are often more difficult to produce than substandard goods, and consumers have a financial incentive to find the cheapest long-term option. With goods that are undergoing rapid change, such as in fashion or high technology, the short lifespan may increase customer satisfaction by allowing them to have newer products. If a nation does not spend, but saves and invests overseas, like Japan does, its GDP will be diminished in comparison to one that spends borrowed money, like the US; thus accumulated savings and debt are not taken into account so long as adequate financing continues. GDP does not measure the sustainability of growth. A country may achieve a temporarily high GDP by overexploiting natural resources or by misallocating investment. Oil-rich states can sustain high GDPs without industrializing, but this high level will not be sustainable past the point when the oil runs out. Economies experiencing a low private-saving rate tend to appear to grow faster due to higher consumption, mortgaging their futures for present growth. Economic growth at the expense of environmental degradation can end up costing dearly to clean up; GDP does not account for this in places such as USA that refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol but being the biggest CO2 producer of the world. As a measure of actual sale prices, GDP does not capture the economic surplus between the price paid and subjective value received, and can therefore underestimate aggregate utility. The annual growth of real GDP is adjusted by using the "GDP deflator", which tends to underestimate the objective differences in the quality of manufactured output over time. The deflator is explicitly based on
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subjective experience when measuring such things as the consumer benefit received from computer-power improvements since the early 1980s. Therefore the GDP figure may underestimate the degree to which improving technology and quality-level are increasing the real standard of living. GDP does not take in to account disparity in incomes between the rich and poor. The limits of GDP can be summed up in the words of two critics. Robert Kennedy who said The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. GNP includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm, and missiles and nuclear warheads, it does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. The second critic, Simon Kuznets the inventor of the GDP, in his very first report to the US Congress in 1934 said, the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income. If the GDP is up, why is America down? Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what. Some economists have attempted to create a replacement for GDP called the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which attempts to address many of the above criticisms. Many nations calculate a national wealth, a sum of all assets in a nation, but this again does not account for future obligations such as environmental degradation, asset booms, and debt. Other nations such as Bhutan have advocated gross national happiness as a standard of living. Bhutan claims to be the world's happiest nation. GDP deflator In economics, the GDP deflator is a measure of the change in prices of all new, domestically produced, final goods and services in an economy. GDP stands for gross domestic product, the total value of all goods and services produced within that economy during a specified period. The GDP deflator is not based on a fixed market basket of goods and services. The basket is allowed to change with people's consumption and investment patterns. Therefore, new expenditure patterns are allowed to show up in the deflator as people respond to changing market prices.

Calculation Measurement in National Accounts In most systems of National Accounts the GDP deflator measures the difference between the real GDP and the nominal GDP. The formula used to calculate the deflator is:
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NB! Effort has been made to faithfully produce these notes. Nevertheless, they should not be considered free of mistakes. Hence, any noted errors will be corrected upon notification.

Dividing the nominal GDP by the GDP deflator would then give the figure for real GDP, hence deflating the nominal GDP into a real measure. It is often useful to consider implicit price deflators for certain subcategories of GDP, such as computer hardware. In this case, it is useful to think of the price deflator as the ratio of the current-year price of a good to its price in some base year. The price in the base year is normalized to 100. For example, for computer hardware, we could define a "unit" to be a computer with a specific level of processing power, memory, hard drive space and so on. A price deflator of 200 means that the current-year price of this computing power is twice its base-year price - a price inflation. A price deflator of 50 means that the current-year price is half the base year price - a price deflation. Unlike a price index, the GDP deflator is not based on a fixed basket of goods and services. The basket is allowed to change with people's consumption and investment patterns. Specifically, for GDP, the "basket" in each year is the set of all goods that were produced domestically, weighted by the market value of the total consumption of each good. Therefore, new expenditure patterns are allowed to show up in the deflator as people respond to changing prices. However, the disadvantage of this approach is that the GDP deflator measures changes in both prices and the composition of the basket, and so should not be used as a measure of pure price changes in the economy. In practice, the difference between the deflator and a price index on the same set of goods and services is relatively small.

United States The GDP and GDP deflator are calculated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Hedonics A hedonic price index for a specific good is based on the price of the good's various characteristics. For example, hedonic price indices are often applied to computers. The price of a computer can be explained as the price of its processor speed, memory, hard drive capacity, and so on. Hedonic price indices can vary over time as the prices of the underlying characteristics change. In recent years, some commentators have expressed concern that the national accounts may overstate spending on computer hardware because of the way the hedonic price index and price deflator are used. It is wellknown that the prices of a unit of processor speed, a unit of memory, and a unit of hard drive capacity have declined very quickly since 1995. Therefore, the current-year, say, 2003 price deflator for an entire computer using the hedonic method - is less than one relative to a base year of 1995. This means that when nominal spending on computer hardware is divided by the deflator to give real spending on computers, the number rises. In this case the "deflator" is actually an inflator. From the second quarter of 2000 through the fourth quarter of 2003, the government estimated that real tech spending rose from $446 billion to $557 billion, when
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nominal spending only increased to $488 billion. Some analysts feel that this overstates the "true" spending on computers. However, the extra $72 billion captures the increase in value of the computers that were purchased, due to the superior quality of computers that sold for the same nominal price in 2003 as in 2000. Price index A price index is any single number calculated from an array of prices and quantities over a period. Since not all prices and quantities of purchases can be recorded, a representative sample is used instead. Inflation and cost indices are calculated as price indices. Notable price indices are Consumer price index Producer price index Personal consumption expenditures price index The GDP deflator differs from the consumer and producer price indexes in that it does not assume a fixed market basket of goods and services.

Calculating price indices There are two main methods to calculate price indices, the Paasche index named after the German economist Hermann Paasche and the Laspeyres index named after the German economist Etienne Laspeyres. The Paasche index is

while the Laspeyres index computes as

where P is the change in price level, p0 and q0 are the prices and quantities in the base year (usually the first), pt and qt those in the year t. The Laspeyres index systematically overstates inflation while the Paasche index understates it. A Laspreyres index of 1 states that a consumer in the current period can afford to buy the same bundle as one consumed in the previous period, given that income has not changed. A Paache index of 1 states that a consumer could have consumed the same bundle in the base period as one is consuming now, given that income has not changed. A third index, the Fisher index named after the American economist Irving Fisher, tries to get around this problem by calculating as the geometric mean of PP and PL:

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