The need to measure a country’s economic performance, both compared to itself a year ago and compared to other countries is ever present. The most prevalent and easiest measure of economic performance at the national level is a country’s GDP (Gross domestic Product) per capita. With plenty of well-established rules and norms for its calculation, as well as the data inputs required for its calculations, almost all countries publish annual GDP figures and use them as a performance measure.
However, just as well-documented are the multitude of potential problems with using GDP. For example, GDP figures can be skewed by the presence of one major industry (such as oil in a number of Middle Eastern countries), does not take into account inequality within a country, and usually excludes domestic and black market production.
Due to these shortcomings, there have been a few efforts to come up with a better measure…
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