Is GDP a gross domestic problem — and what about ‘social capital’, asks Davos
Developed in 1934, GDP cannot measure the distribution of wealth within a country, nor its black market
Davos, Switzerland — It can topple governments, confer international bragging rights, and pretty much obsessed the government of China once the country began its long march back to economic prowess. But is gross domestic product (GDP) outliving its usefulness as a metric of economic size, and is it stoking social and environmental crisis by encouraging growth at any cost? Debate about whether it is time to adopt a more nuanced calculator has been growing in recent years, and featured anew during discussions at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos this week. “There’s emerging agreement that the kind of statistics we’ve used in the past just aren’t working any more,” British economist Prof Diane Coyle from the University of Manchester told AFP in Davos. Coyle is one of several experts who have written books on the subject. Others have detailed proposals such as a “human development index”, and a new addition to the literature comes this week from Financial Times journalist David Pi...
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