Gross Domestic Product-an Index of Economic Welfare or a Meaningless Metric?
In: The independent review: journal of political economy, Band 20, Heft 1, S. 153
ISSN: 1086-1653
It is almost impossible to imagine the development of economics since World War II apart from the availability and pervasive employment of the national income and product accounts. Before the war, however, such measures remained strictly in the development stage, as economists such as Colin Clark and Simon Kuznets worked for years to produce estimates of the sort that any elementary economics student or newspaper reader now encounters daily in frequently updated form. Estimates of gross domestic product, along with its variants and detailed components, became an essential part of economic analysis only when the Great Depression, the emergence of Keynesian macroeconomics, and the Western powers' engagement in World War II brought such estimates to the fore in the late 1930s and early 1940s. When Kuznets and others were engaged in pioneering the development of the national accounts, substantial controversy arose regarding a variety of related issues. Among the many issues involved in these developments, none loomed larger than that of the meaning and purpose of national income and product. Adapted from the source document.