In a review of Diane Coyle’s GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, aptly titled “Measuring the Unmeasurable,” James Grant highlights many of the difficulties involved in aggregate statistical ...

It’s an odd quirk of history that, on the first day of his ill-fated presidential campaign in March 1968, Robert F Kennedy chose to talk to his audience about the limitations of gross domestic product ...

It’s no secret that gross domestic product, the number that serves as a measure for economic progress around the world, is hardly a barometer of human flourishing. It registers the harvest of a forest ...

Gross domestic product (GDP) has long been the main indicator of economic growth used almost everywhere in the world. However, the measurement does not take into account other factors essential to a ...

Seriously. How are you feeling about your economic situation? Because the unemployment rate is still near generational lows, inflation is down to 3.2%, and gross domestic product, or GDP, grew at a ...

For decades, economic development was judged primarily through a narrow set of indicators, most notably gross domestic ...

For decades, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been used as a benchmark of society’s progress. Yet, as the GDP figures keep ticking up, so too does a profound disenchantment with the political and ...

Richard Heys is deputy chief economist in the Office for National Statistics, Newport, UK. For decades, economists have known that using gross domestic product (GDP) alone to guide policy is ...

This Economic Letter discusses a topic that at first glance appears to be boring and technical but that in fact turns out to be quite important: the proper interpretation of chain-weighted data. To ...

French president Nicolas Sarkozy drew heat last month when he suggested that countries should factor happiness into their statistics for growth. After all, Sarkozy campaigned on promises of wealth ...