Archive for the ‘gdp’ tag
America’s Pets #
Your disturbing statistic of the day comes care of Passport, who points out that the amount Americans spend on health care for their pets is roughly the same as the GDPs of Botswana or Bahrain.
Foreign Aid vs. Leisure Spending #
Sadly, I don’t have any servicable graphing program, so I don’t actually have a chart for you. I just thought it was rather interesting that The Economist ran the amount of foreign aid given by OECD countries one day and followed that with the amount spent on leisure in those same countries. It should also be noted that both graphs are per percent of GDP, not a simple total value.
Why GDP Doesn’t Work #
This week’s Economist makes the argument that total GDP, which is usually used for measures of growth from country to country doesn’t work very well. Because it ignores the direction of population size, it distorts the picture in favor of growing countries — and misses the fact that the US is already in a recession.
Once you accept that growth in GDP per head is the best way to measure economic performance, the standard definition of a recession—a decline in real GDP over some period (eg, two consecutive quarters or year on year)—also seems flawed. For example, zero GDP growth in Japan, where the population is declining, would still leave the average citizen better off. But in America, the average person would be worse off. A better definition of recession, surely, is a fall in average income per person. On this basis, America has been in recession since the fourth quarter of last year when its GDP rose by an annualised 0.6%, implying that real income per head fell by 0.4%.