Talk:Gross Domestic Product/Draft

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If your graph brings out the danger of making GDP comparisons at nominal exchange rates, it will help to support the text. Otherwise, I'm not sure what purpose it would serve. Nick Gardner 00:58, 7 December 2007 (CST)

Graphics make things pretty. I like your idea but it will take a little more work... maybe I'll get to it in the future. Stephen Saletta 22:25, 9 December 2007 (CST)

Can someone do something with the mess on GDP deflator and either link to it or perhaps include the content here? --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 02:53, 5 December 2007 (CST)

How about a new article titled "Price Index" that would include the GDP deflator (revised) and the various consumer-, producer- and commodity-price indexes, and that would explain the base- and chain-linking options? Nick Gardner 04:00, 5 December 2007 (CST)

Yes, sounds good. WE have to make sure that all of these are interlinked. Maybe, I am not sure, but maybe the price index article could be a subpage of the GDP article. I think there should be a separate article on HDI, because it is rather more than GDP ! Martin Baldwin-Edwards

I have added in the opening para something on per capita and a link to HDI. Martin Baldwin-Edwards 15:34, 7 December 2007 (CST)

I have put the briefest possible of references to the HDI, ISEW and GPI in the text but I have not shown links for the last two. Perhaps I should? (They all strike me as fruitless games played by academics and pressure groups, to which no policy maker ever gives a second thought. The whole idea of being able to measure policy success by a single number would seem to them to be ridiculous).

I don't at present envisage adding much more, apart from two paragraphs on accuracy and reliability, one for GDP and one for GDP comparisons. Should there be anything else? Nick Gardner 09:40, 8 December 2007 (CST)

Nick, I'd still like to see a little something on the history of the GDP; would make it a little more "encyclopedic". Also:

===Household accounts===

Among the economic activities that are not recorded in the national accounts is unpaid production within a country’s households. It has been estimated that for Britain such production amounts to over 40 per cent of GDP. That omission can in principle be corrected by constructing household accounts based upon "time use surveys" , and several countries are planning to publish "satellite accounts" for that purpose.

What's a satellite account? Could you be more explicit about what a time use survey measures? (I realize this seems obvious but if you're talking about domestic work maybe spell out that you're talking about housework rather than than my unpaid CPA wife who does the books for my company.) Optionally, you might want to consider a sentence about the underground economy. Rather than accuracy and reliability I'ld rather see

• historical perspectice
• elaboration on "household accounts"

and I'd think it's ready for approval. Stephen Saletta 22:25, 9 December 2007 (CST)

Thank you, Stephen. I have redrafted the household output paragraph to meet your comments. As to history, GDP has none except as part of national income accounting, and I would expect the history of that to be dealt with in the article on that subject. However, I have added a brief paragraph to this article on the assumption that it will be expanded and transferred to that article in due course. I have added the missing paragraphs on accuracy and reliability because I consider that to be the most important and least understood aspect of the subject Nick Gardner 09:39, 14 December 2007 (CST)

Probably a mention of GNP and a link to a stub on that would be agood idea. Any thoughts on whether we need Net definitions as well as Gross? These seem to crop up all the time, although I am not convinced of their utility.Martin Baldwin-Edwards 08:39, 6 January 2008 (CST)

Martin - Had you overlooked the 3rd sentence of the definitions paragraph:

(If income from abroad is allowed for, gross domestic product becomes gross national product (GNP), and if depreciation is also allowed for, it becomes net national product or simply national income).?

I can't think what else there is to say. Nick Gardner 01:58, 7 January 2008 (CST)

Oh, I missed that! Apologies.--Martin Baldwin-Edwards 07:28, 10 January 2008 (CST)

Approaching Approval

My feeling is that this is near approval. I would like to see one addition, which is some discussion of the informal economy/ black economy and adjustments to GDP made because of these. I suppose we need an article Informal economy within which will be subsumed black, illegal, grey etc. For this article, just a mention of the problem caused by informal economic activity for GDP measurement, and that two EU countries add to their GDP notional black activities. Italy has been doing this for some time ( I think it is about 15%) and Greece has just started this year. Martin Baldwin-Edwards 09:20, 31 January 2008 (CST)

Martin - I'll see what I can do - although the last time I looked into this, I discovered nothing that carried more conviction than a blind guess. Nick Gardner 16:04, 31 January 2008 (CST)

PS: something seems to have gone wrong with the reference that you have substituted: http://hdr.undp.org/en/. It seems to be about climate change and its connection with GDP seems somewhat remote. Perhaps you intended http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/ which seems somewhat more to the point (but still rather speculative).

There was nothing wrong with the reference: there is something wrong with the HDR people, who have suddenly decided that their report for 2007 should be about climate change:-(( . The Greek GDP adjustment is based on political expediency [along with estimated of the black economy at around 25-35% and increasing]. The Italians have a sophisticated system of imputing the extent of illegal employment and some complex calculations to legitimise their GDP adjustment. I could email some Italian economists and ask if they can help us: I know that the Greek ones cannot! --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 17:10, 31 January 2008 (CST)

I have had a stab at a brief paragraph - feel free etc. You will see that I have included a link to an article on "The shadow economy" (that seems to be the academically with-it term for the black economy) but the estimating methodology seems to be so esoteric as to require the services of a modern mathematician to draft it! -Nick Gardner 04:21, 1 February 2008 (CST)

OK. I have made some adjustments. There is a problem with terminology, which is one of the reasons that I don;t like this politically correct "shadow economy", because the term "black" is clear that these are deliberately unrecorded to avoid taxation, as opposed to the lawfully unrecorded household activities.

Anyway, I have tried to clarify and added some links to Schneider's online publications [he is not IMF staff, by the way].

I am happy with your amendments - but do we need links to both "informal economy" and "shadow economy"?

Nick Gardner 09:54, 2 February 2008 (CST)

No, probably not. What is more problematic is that I have just read an ILO publication on the informal economy which insists that the term does NOT cover household unpaid activities, and is synonymous with black economy. I will have to sort this out with references; maybe I will change it again:-(( When that is finished, I will nominate it for approval -- leaving some time for people to argue/change things, as I got a bit involved with writing on it. Martin Baldwin-Edwards 10:08, 2 February 2008 (CST)

New technology

I have just spotted and corrected an incorrect statement that seems to have crept in as the second sentence of the New technology paragraph. I have done a careful check without spotting any other errors - Nick Gardner 05:04, 1 February 2008 (CST)

Approval discussion

Hi All, I came by to perform the mechanics of approval on this article (sorry for the delay) and I notice an individual editor approval by economics editor User:Martin Baldwin-Edwards with economics author User:Nick Gardner and economics editor User:Stephen Saletta. However,this edit appears to be content related. I'll give it another day to allow you to sort it all out. D. Matt Innis 22:32, 18 February 2008 (CST)