Word: gdp
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...Given the number of foreign companies that have set up their own facilities in China, the government is unlikely to let them fail completely, says New Energy Finance's Ying. "If they have manufacturing capacity in China, they generate GDP, generate tax revenue, generate employment, I do not see a reason why the Chinese government would let them die," he says. "A parent may like one child more than the other, but at the end of the day I think they will continue to do well and continue to do business in China." With the rest of the global economy...
...about confusing economic activity with wellbeing ever since the economist Simon Kuznets devised a way to measure that activity at the end of the Great Depression. Kuznets himself warned that "the welfare of a nation can ... scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income." Seventy-five years on, GDP feels like an idea whose time has finally passed. "GDP measures, in a certain sense, how much stuff we can produce that we can drop on an enemy," Alan Krueger - now a top-ranked economist in the Obama Administration - said at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) World...
Natural disasters, oil spills, car crashes, riots, crime: anything you pay to fix will boost GDP. Helping a neighbor up the stairs, skipping work to watch your son's Little League game, strolling in the woods won't. GDP tallies the value of an item, but not the environmental cost of its production: pollution, carbon emissions or the depletion of minerals and ecosystems. "It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets," said Robert Kennedy in 1968. "It does not include the beauty of our poetry...
...GDP doesn't even consistently measure what actually gets done. Did you pay a cleaning company to clean your floors? Congratulations, you've added to this year's numbers. Did you scrub them yourself? Sorry, you haven't. Buying eggs from a factory farm: a GDP boost. Raising chickens in your backyard: nope. Forty years ago, buying a VCR to watch a movie at home would have been a significant contribution. Today, picking up a DVD player adds almost nothing. But doesn't the more modern machine provide the better picture...
...President Nicolas Sarkozy unveiled an "emergency plan" for teaching foreign languages in the nation's schools with the lofty objective that "all our high school students must become bilingual, and some should be trilingual." Why the panic? Because as Sarkozy noted, a nation that spends 5.8% of its annual GDP on education - the fifth-highest percentage in the world - simply must do better than its current rank of 69th among 109 countries on the standardized Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). To that end, Sarkozy has proposed exposing students to more native-speaking English instructors, increasing contacts between...