2013 Articles

Gross Domestic Product: Grossly incomplete, but we can fix it

Wagner, Gernot

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is broken. Still, we shouldn’t scrap GDP and start over. Up to a point, GDP does tell us important facts about people’s lives, livelihoods and aspirations. Living on a dollar a day is miserable no matter how you look at it.

Choking on economic growth, of course, is equally bad. There are a few simple, well-established steps we ought to take to bring GDP closer to where we should be. That, by the way, isn’t “Green GDP” or “green accounting.” It’s honest accounting.