National Statistical

After 70 years of production Gross Domestic Product (GDP) remains the single most closely watched economic indicator. The success  of government economic policy is judged against it and it’s the yardstick for the scale of public spending and debt.  As Rob Kent-Smith explains, calculating GDP requires the informed balancing of sometimes contradictory data sources.     

Recently GDP has come under some close scrutiny for failing to capture unpaid work and the impact of economic growth on the environment. Jonathan Athow looks at GDP’s strengths as well as some other measures and statistics that can be used to understand wider measures of well-being.