Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced and rendered in a specific time period by a country or countries. GDP is more often used by the government of a single country to measure its economic health. Due to its complex and subjective nature, this measure is often revised before being considered a reliable indicator.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP).
Business cycles are intervals of general expansion followed by recession in economic performance. The changes in economic activity that characterize business cycles have important implications for the welfare of the general population, government institutions, and private sector firms. There are numerous specific definitions of what constitutes a business cycle. The simplest and most naïve characterization comes from regarding recessions as 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. More satisfactory classifications are provided by, first including more economic indicators and second by looking for more informative data patterns than the ad hoc 2 quarter definition.
Capital intensity is the amount of fixed or real capital present in relation to other factors of production, especially labor. At the level of either a production process or the aggregate economy, it may be estimated by the capital to labor ratio, such as from the points along a capital/labor isoquant. The inverse of capital intensity is labor intensity. Capital intensity is sometimes associated with industrialism, while labor intensity is sometimes associated with agrarianism.
An intangible asset is an asset that lacks physical substance. Examples are patents, copyright, franchises, goodwill, trademarks, and trade names, as well as any form of digital asset such as software or cryptocurrency, including stablecoins in duress. This is in contrast to physical assets and financial assets. Intangible assets are usually very difficult to value.They suffer from typical market failures of non-rivalry and non-excludability. Today, a large part of the corporate economy consists of intangible assets, reflecting the growth of information technology and organizational capital.
Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production process, i.e. output per unit of input, typically over a specific period of time. The most common example is the (aggregate) labour productivity measure, one example of which is GDP per worker. There are many different definitions of productivity and the choice among them depends on the purpose of the productivity measurement and data availability. The key source of difference between various productivity measures is also usually related to how the outputs and the inputs are aggregated to obtain such a ratio-type measure of productivity.
The green gross domestic product is an index of economic growth with the environmental consequences of that growth factored into a country's conventional GDP. Green GDP monetizes the loss of biodiversity, and accounts for costs caused by climate change. Some environmental experts prefer physical indicators, which may be aggregated to indices such as the "Sustainable Development Index".
Government spending or expenditure includes all government consumption, investment, and transfer payments. In national income accounting, the acquisition by governments of goods and services for current use, to directly satisfy the individual or collective needs of the community, is classed as government final consumption expenditure. Government acquisition of goods and services intended to create future benefits, such as infrastructure investment or research spending, is classed as government investment. These two types of government spending, on final consumption and on gross capital formation, together constitute one of the major components of gross domestic product.
National accounts or national account systems (NAS) are the implementation of complete and consistent accounting techniques for measuring the economic activity of a nation. These include detailed underlying measures that rely on double-entry accounting. By design, such accounting makes the totals on both sides of an account equal even though they each measure different characteristics, for example production and the income from it. As a method, the subject is termed national accounting or, more generally, social accounting. Stated otherwise, national accounts as systems may be distinguished from the economic data associated with those systems. While sharing many common principles with business accounting, national accounts are based on economic concepts. One conceptual construct for representing flows of all economic transactions that take place in an economy is a social accounting matrix with accounts in each respective row-column entry.
The net domestic product (NDP) equals the gross domestic product (GDP) minus depreciation on a country's capital goods.
A technical change is a term used in economics to describe a change in the amount of output produced from the same amount of inputs. A technical change is not necessarily technological as it might be organizational, or due to a change in a constraint such as regulation, input prices, or quantities of inputs. Some scholars note the paradox that technical change is considered to be the most important source of economic dynamism, the rate of change in capitalist economies, but it is ignored in mainstream media.
In economics, total-factor productivity (TFP), also called multi-factor productivity, is usually measured as the ratio of aggregate output to aggregate inputs. Under some simplifying assumptions about the production technology, growth in TFP becomes the portion of growth in output not explained by growth in traditionally measured inputs of labour and capital used in production. TFP is calculated by dividing output by the weighted geometric average of labour and capital input, with the standard weighting of 0.7 for labour and 0.3 for capital. Total factor productivity is a measure of productive efficiency in that it measures how much output can be produced from a certain amount of inputs. It accounts for part of the differences in cross-country per-capita income. For relatively small percentage changes, the rate of TFP growth can be estimated by subtracting growth rates of labor and capital inputs from the growth rate of output.
The productivity paradox, also referred to as the Solow paradox, could refer either to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s despite rapid development in the field of information technology (IT) over the same period, or to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States and developed countries from the 2000s to 2020s; sometimes the newer slowdown is referred to as the productivity slowdown, the productivity puzzle, or the productivity paradox 2.0. The 1970s to 1980s productivity paradox inspired many research efforts at explaining the slowdown, only for the paradox to disappear with renewed productivity growth in the developed countries in the 1990s. However, issues raised by those research efforts remain important in the study of productivity growth in general, and became important again when productivity growth slowed around the world again from the 2000s to the present day.
Advanced Placement (AP) Macroeconomics is an Advanced Placement macroeconomics course for high school students that culminates in an exam offered by the College Board.
Domar aggregation is an approach to aggregating growth measures associated with industries to make larger sector or national aggregate growth rates. The issue comes up in the context of national accounts and multifactor productivity (MFP) statistics.
Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was an American economist who served as the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University. An influential econometric scholar, he was famed for his work on the relationship between productivity and economic growth, the economics of climate change, and the intersection between economics and statistics. Described as a "master" of his field, he received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1971, and was described as a worthy contender for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Production is the process of combining various inputs, both material and immaterial in order to create output. Ideally this output will be a good or service which has value and contributes to the utility of individuals. The area of economics that focuses on production is called production theory, and it is closely related to the consumption theory of economics.
Real business-cycle theory is a class of new classical macroeconomics models in which business-cycle fluctuations are accounted for by real shocks. Unlike other leading theories of the business cycle, RBC theory sees business cycle fluctuations as the efficient response to exogenous changes in the real economic environment. That is, the level of national output necessarily maximizes expected utility, and governments should therefore concentrate on long-run structural policy changes and not intervene through discretionary fiscal or monetary policy designed to actively smooth out economic short-term fluctuations.
The Indigo Era is a concept publicized by businessman Mikhail Fridman, describing what he views as an emerging new era of economies and economics based on ideas, innovation, and creativity, replacing those based on the possession of natural resources. Fridman is the co-founder of LetterOne, an international investment business, and first publicized the idea in early 2016. The word "indigo" was initially chosen based on the term indigo children, which has been used to describe people with unusual and innovative abilities.
