(Italiano) Cari compagni americani, vi scrivo questa lettera…
Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.
Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.
The “Beyond Gdp” meeting in Brussels put together environmentalists and economists on the concept of sustainable development and the ways to measure it. The old Gross domestic product is not perfect, but instead of quarreling ideologically around it, it is much better to work together researching new measures of the human progress. But the task…
Wikinomics, the new system to which everybody contributes freely through internet, puts under discussion some of our basic economic concepts. The gross domestic product (Gdp), for example, is based on the idea of measuring “wealth”. But what is wealth if an important part of the economy develops without payments and without prices?
Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.
The Report Going for Growth by Oecd, released on Tuesday 7th, includes a Chapter on “alternative measures of well being”. I am sorry that only a short summary of the report is freely available on line, with few references to this chapter, but I will try summarize
A new survey on the household budgets by the Bank of Italy gives food for thought on the evolution of the Italian economy. We were used to think that the Italian regions follow two different patterns: the North, with European standards of living, and the South, the Mezzogiorno, trying to catch up but always far behind.
The Italian central bank (Banca d’Italia), who has a very efficient research center, released the results of its biennial survey, with some surprising results.
Is the Gdp (Gross domestic product) a correct way to measure the progress of a nation? The problem is well known to statisticians and economists, with controversies that you can read in wikipedia and in many papers. Even the United Nations through its agency Undp, has launched a few years ago a new indicator, the Human Development Index, which takes into consideration not only the economic wealth, but also education and life expectancy.
In recent times, the Gdp problem is becoming more and more political and not only statistical. For many reasons: