The measurement of economic worth over time is the problem of relating past prices, costs, values and proportions of social production to current ones. For a number of reasons, relating any past indicator to a current indicator of worth is theoretically and practically difficult for economists, historians, and political economists. This has led to some questioning of the idea of time series of worth having any meaning. However, the popular demand for measurements of social worth over time have caused the production of a number of series.
People often seek a comparison between the price of an item in the past, and the price of an item today. Over short periods of time, like months, inflation may measure the role an object and its cost played in an economy: the price of fuel may rise or fall over a month. The price of money itself changes over time, as does the availability of goods and services as they move into or out of production. What people choose to consume changes over time. Finally, concepts such as cash money economies may not exist in past periods, nor ideas like wage labour or capital investment. Comparing what someone paid for a good, how much they had to work for that money, what the money was worth, how scarce a particular good was, what role it played in someone's standard of living, what its proportion was as part of social income, and what proportion it was as part of possible social production is a difficult task. This task is made more difficult by conflicting theoretical concepts of worth.
One chief problem is the competition between different fundamental conceptions of the division of social product into measurable or theorisable concepts. Marxist and political economic value, neoclassical marginalist, and other ideas regarding proportion of social product not measured in money terms have arisen. [1]
Official measures by governments have a limited depth of the time series, mainly originating in the 20th century. Even within these series, changes in parameters such as consumption bundles, or measures of GDP fundamentally affect the worth of a series.
Historical series computed from statistical data sets, or estimated from archival records have a number of other problems, including changing consumption bundles, consumption bundles not representing standard measures, and changes to the structure of social worth itself such as the move to wage labour and market economies.
A different time series should be used depending on what kind of economic object is being compared over time:
A wage price series is a set of data claiming to indicate the real wages and real prices of goods over a span of time, and their relationship to each other through the price of money at the time they were compared. Wage price series are currently collected and computed by major governments. Wage price series are also computed historically by economic historians and non-government organisations. Both contemporary and historical wage price series are inherently controversial, as they speak to the standard of living of working-class people.
Contemporary wage price series are the result of the normal operation of government economic statistics units, and are often produced as part of the National income accounts.
Computing a historical wage price series requires discovering government or non government data, determining if the measures of wage or price are appropriate, and then manipulating the data. Some of these series have been criticised for failing to deal with a number of significant data and theoretical problems.
Due to the survival of literary records of economic life from the 13th century in the South of England, extensive attempts have been made to produce long run wage price series regarding Southern England, England in General, or the United Kingdom in the British Isles. Officer's production of a series from 1264 is reliant on a number of assumptions which he readily admits produce questions about his series' representation of reality. Officer is reliant on subseries compiled using different criteria, and these series are reliant upon primary sources that describe different earnings and expenses bundles. The assumption of universal wage labour and a retail goods market, the assumption of money rents, the inability to compute non-market earnings such as obligatory benefits received from masters or the right to squat, all impact on the quality and representative nature of Officer's sources and series.
Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced in a specific time period. GDP (nominal) per capita does not, however, reflect differences in the cost of living and the inflation rates of the countries; therefore, using a basis of GDP per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) is arguably more useful when comparing living standards between nations, while nominal GDP is more useful comparing national economies on the international market.
The economy of the United States is that of a highly developed country with a mixed economy. It is the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and net wealth and the second-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). It has the world's fifth-highest per capita GDP (nominal) and the seventh-highest per capita GDP (PPP) in 2020. The United States has the most technologically powerful economy in the world and its firms are at or near the forefront in technological advances, especially in computers, pharmaceuticals, and medical, aerospace, and military equipment. The U.S. dollar is the currency most used in international transactions and is the world's foremost reserve currency, backed by its economy, its military, the petrodollar system and its linked eurodollar and large U.S. treasuries market. Several countries use it as their official currency and in others it is the de facto currency. The largest U.S. trading partners are China, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Germany, South Korea, United Kingdom, France, India, and Taiwan. The U.S. is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter. It has free trade agreements with several nations, including the USMCA, Australia, South Korea, Israel, and few others that are in effect or under negotiation.
In economics, inflation is a general rise in the price level in an economy over a period of time. When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation reflects a reduction in the purchasing power per unit of money – a loss of real value in the medium of exchange and unit of account within the economy. The opposite of inflation is deflation, a sustained decrease in the general price level of goods and services. The common measure of inflation is the inflation rate, the annualized percentage change in a general price index, usually the consumer price index, over time.
A variety of measures of national income and output are used in economics to estimate total economic activity in a country or region, including gross domestic product (GDP), gross national product (GNP), net national income (NNI), and adjusted national income. All are specially concerned with counting the total amount of goods and services produced within the economy and by various sectors. The boundary is usually defined by geography or citizenship, and it is also defined as the total income of the nation and also restrict the goods and services that are counted. For instance, some measures count only goods & services that are exchanged for money, excluding bartered goods, while other measures may attempt to include bartered goods by imputing monetary values to them.
Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a measurement of prices in different countries that uses the prices of specific goods to compare the absolute purchasing power of the countries' currencies. In many cases, PPP produces an inflation rate that is equal to the price of the basket of goods at one location divided by the price of the basket of goods at a different location. The PPP inflation and exchange rate may differ from the market exchange rate because of poverty, tariffs, and other transaction costs.
An economic indicator is a statistic about an economic activity. Economic indicators allow analysis of economic performance and predictions of future performance. One application of economic indicators is the study of business cycles. Economic indicators include various indices, earnings reports, and economic summaries: for example, the unemployment rate, quits rate, housing starts, consumer price index, consumer leverage ratio, industrial production, bankruptcies, gross domestic product, broadband internet penetration, retail sales, stock market prices, and money supply changes.
In economics, the GDP deflator is a measure of the level of prices of all new, domestically produced, final goods and services in an economy in a year. GDP stands for gross domestic product, the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within the territory of a country over a particular period of time.
Productivity describes various measures of the efficiency of production. Often, a productivity measure is expressed as the 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, e.g., such as GDP per worker. There are many different definitions of productivity and the choice among them depends on the purpose of the productivity measurement and/or data availability. The key source of difference between various productivity measures is also usually related to how the outputs and the inputs are aggregated into scalars to obtain such a ratio-type measure of productivity. Types of production are mass production and batch production.
In economics, nominal value is measured in terms of money, whereas real value is measured against goods or services. A real value is one which has been adjusted for inflation, enabling comparison of quantities as if the prices of goods had not changed on average. Changes in value in real terms therefore exclude the effect of inflation. In contrast with a real value, a nominal value has not been adjusted for inflation, and so changes in nominal value reflect at least in part the effect of inflation.
Real wages are wages adjusted for inflation, or, equivalently, wages in terms of the amount of goods and services that can be bought. This term is used in contrast to nominal wages or unadjusted wages.
Genuine progress indicator (GPI) is a metric that has been suggested to replace, or supplement, gross domestic product (GDP). The GPI is designed to take fuller account of the well-being of a nation, only a part of which pertains to the size of the nation's economy, by incorporating environmental and social factors which are not measured by GDP. For instance, some models of GPI decrease in value when the poverty rate increases. The GPI separates the concept of societal progress from economic growth.
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.
Gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) is a macroeconomic concept used in official national accounts such as the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA), National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) and the European System of Accounts (ESA). The concept dates back to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) studies of Simon Kuznets of capital formation in the 1930s, and standard measures for it were adopted in the 1950s. Statistically it measures the value of acquisitions of new or existing fixed assets by the business sector, governments and "pure" households less disposals of fixed assets. GFCF is a component of the expenditure on gross domestic product (GDP), and thus shows something about how much of the new value added in the economy is invested rather than consumed.
In economics, gross output (GO) is the measure of total economic activity in the production of new goods and services in an accounting period. It is a much broader measure of the economy than gross domestic product (GDP), which is limited mainly to final output. As of first-quarter 2019, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated gross output in the United States to be $37.2 trillion, compared to $21.1 trillion for GDP.
The United States Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a set of consumer price indices calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). To be precise, the BLS routinely computes many different CPIs that are used for different purposes. Each is a time series measure of the price of consumer goods and services. The BLS publishes the CPI monthly.
Personal income is an individual's total earnings from wages, investment interest, and other sources. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median personal income of $865 weekly for all full-time workers in 2017. The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median personal income at $35,977 in 2019 with a base year of 1980.
In economics, gross value added (GVA) is the measure of the value of goods and services produced in an area, industry or sector of an economy. "Gross value added is the value of output minus the value of intermediate consumption; it is a measure of the contribution to GDP made by an individual producer, industry or sector; gross value added is the source from which the primary incomes of the SNA are generated and is therefore carried forward into the primary distribution of income account."
In Marxian economics, surplus value is the difference between the amount raised through a sale of a product and the amount it cost to the owner of that product to manufacture it: i.e. the amount raised through sale of the product minus the cost of the materials, plant and labour power. The concept originated in Ricardian socialism, with the term "surplus value" itself being coined by William Thompson in 1824; however, it was not consistently distinguished from the related concepts of surplus labor and surplus product. The concept was subsequently developed and popularized by Karl Marx. Marx's formulation is the standard sense and the primary basis for further developments, though how much of Marx's concept is original and distinct from the Ricardian concept is disputed. Marx's term is the German word "Mehrwert", which simply means value added, and is cognate to English "more worth".
This glossary of economics is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in economics, its sub-disciplines, and related fields.
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