Word: gdp
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Until May 29, that is, when Commerce releases a revised "preliminary" GDP number. On June 26 comes the "final" first-quarter GDP, but even that won't really be final: in a few years there will be a "benchmark revision" that changes everything yet again...
This is not a tale of bureaucratic bungling. It's just evidence that compiling a reliable measure of all the economic activity in a country as big as this one is hard. Which is something to consider whenever you hear somebody arguing that GDP ought to be shelved in favor of some more holistic measure of economic well-being. Somebody like, say, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who early this year appointed a high-powered task force--boasting not just one but two economics Nobelists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz--to devise a GDP replacement. Similar "ditch-GDP" noises...
...there certainly are measures of economic and societal success that we ought to pay more attention to. But ditch GDP? Perish the thought...
...last day of April, the folks at the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis will announce how much they think the U.S. economy grew--or didn't--in the first quarter of this year. This "advance" estimate of gross domestic product (GDP) will stand as the clearest indicator yet of whether the U.S. has fallen into a recession...
...downs (mostly downs) of the business cycle in the 1930s. Then military planners needed a better way to assess production capacity. The result was gross national product (GNP), which after the war soon became the standard means of keeping economic score. It was replaced in 1991 by GDP, which measures production in the U.S. as opposed to production by Americans, but the basic idea is the same. The concept conquered the world--with Germany deserving special mention as surely the only country ever to have produced a chart-topping pop song about GNP (Geier Sturzflug's Bruttosozialprodukt...