Stop bashing GDP!

So everybody hates the Gross Domestic Product! The New York Times and the Financial Times have recently published articles criticizing the main measure of production in the economy. This is certainly not new, and criticism of the value of GDP for certain purposes, as a measure of well-being, for example, have led in the past to the creation of other variables like the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index, which includes GDP per capita (actually Gross National Income per capita), life expectancy at birth and average years of schooling for adults.

In fact, the NYTimes article basis for the supposedly dramatic "Rise and Fall of the GDP" is it's inability to measure well-being, and in it the author emphasizes its disadvantages when compared to the HDI. The NYTimes piece quotes Sen, the godfather of HDI, complaining about the "silliness about identifying growth with development." Of course, since GDP is only about the material growth of the economy, it would be an incomplete measure of development.

The most common type of critique is that GDP does not count many things, like environmental degradation, or happiness (yep, I know; check Putnam's ideas in the NYTimes piece; talk about silliness), or almost all non-market transactions for that matter, or is slow to adjust to new products and services introduced in the market, and that it's not particularly good for understanding inequality (Robert Reich's complaint in FT's piece; check the full list of complaints in both articles linked above). The best defense is provided by William Nordhaus, who argues compellingly that: “if you want to know why GDP matters, you can just put yourself back in the 1930 period, where we had no idea what was happening to our economy.”

First, GDP is not a measure of everything, and it certainly has limitations. But it does measure relatively well the material production in a given year, and provides the basis for understanding the process of accumulation, which is central for understanding the dynamics of capitalism. And actually, if you look at functional distribution of income in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), which are used to calculate GDP, you do have one of the best measures of income inequality! Yes growth of the flow of goods and services produced in a country in a year is not tantamount to development, but without growth developing countries cannot achieve the levels of well-being of advanced economies, so growth is kind of a pre-requiste (and yes, growth involves environmental degradation, and we should try to minimize it). Further, with GDP one can obtain a fairly good measure of productivity (labor productivity), which is the basis for the Wealth of Nations, if you believe that dude Adam Smith.

My beef with the profession is not the use of GDP growth as a measure of material progress, but the fact that a limited, supply-constrained, individual maximizing utility, market-friendly, neoclassical version of the process of growth and development is the dominant one. But GDP is fine. Like price indexes, which also are limited and sometimes inaccurate, is an essential tool for understanding the real world.

Internet access and relative economic development

There are a few alternative measures of economic well being. GDP per capita is one, and a measure of output (Gross National Income) was complemented in the 1990s with life expectancy and education in the well-known index of Human Development (HDI). The figure below shows access to internet around the world.

Note that this measure shows a very similar result to the HDI. US, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and Japan (South Korea too and some of the Gulf States) have high levels of access to the internet. The Southern Cone in Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and a few Arab counties are in the middle, with China, part Eastern Europe not far behind. Then the low access countries are in Africa and Southern Asia.

Human Development Index: now and then

The new Human Development Report is out. It compares the 2012 Human Development Index (HDI) with the initial one, from 1990. Norway at the top, and Congo at the bottom of the list. As it turns out, only two countries, Zimbabwe and Lesotho, have seen their index scores fall. The chart below shows several countries (h/t The Economist).

The additional red dot, is the Inequality adjusted HDI (IHDI). Note also that in the case of Western European countries (Norway, Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, Britain) the IHDI is in between the 1990 and the 2012 HDI. So adjusted to inequality the HDI now is better than in 1990. That is not the case for the US. For the methodology for including inequality in the HDI go here.

The largest improvements in the index are Afghnistan (ravaged by a 10 year war with Russia when it started to be measured; and with significant transfers from the US now), China, Iran, India, and Egypt. Left of center countries in Latin America did reasonably well in the last 10 years.

The report suggests that: "the state of affairs in 2013 may appear as a tale of two worlds: a resurgent South—most visibly countries such as China and India, where there is much human development progress, growth appears to remain robust and the prospects for poverty reduction are encouraging—and a North in crisis—where austerity policies and the absence of economic growth are imposing hardship on millions of unemployed people and people deprived of benefits as social compacts come under intense pressure." Further, it argues that the number one driver of improvement in the Global South is a: "strong, proactive and responsible state [that] develops policies for both public and private sectors", since "governments can nurture industries that would not otherwise emerge."

PS: The HDI was developed by Amartya Sen, who also got the Sveriges Riksbank Prize. His work on the capabilities approach is based on social welfare theory and, while critical of the idea of rationality, in some aspects it remains founded in mainstream analysis. For a discussion of his critique of the mainstream and its relation to the one based on the surplus approach see the references provided by Robert Vienneau here. I remain skeptical about the compatibility of Sen's analysis with the old and forgotten classical tradition.