论文总字数：32785字

Southeast University

Anthony Sedibo Phaladi

14211146

The effects of using alternatives to Gross Domestic Product  as a measure of Social Progress and Welfare--taking Botswana and China as an example

Abstract

This paper discusses Gross Domestic Product and related concepts as a measure of social progress and welfare. Although GDP remains the most widely used measure of social progress, the recent global financial crisis and continued depletion of natural resources and environmental adverse impact has brought into question the use of GDP as the main indicator of social welfare. Four alternatives to GDP are assessed and evaluated as the standard for national accounts for Botswana and China. Alternatives fall into the following broad categories, corrected GDP and extended national accounts,composite indexes and subjective approaches.

Key Words: composite indicators; economic growth; GDP, sustainable indixes. Botswana, China

Contents

1

Abstract 1

CHAPTER ONE 3

Introduction 3

Limitations of GDP 3

Chapter Two 9

Introduction to Botswana and China 9

China in Numbers 11

Chapter Three 13

Alternatives to GDP 13

Human Development Index 14

Calculating HDI 14

Criticism of HDI 15

Chapter Four 16

HDI 16

China 17

Graph 4.1 GDB of China vs HDI 17

Interpretation of HDI results 18

Genuine Savings 18

Botswana 18

China 19

The results are displayed below 19

Table 4.4 Botswana GDP vs GS regression results 19

Interpretation of GS results 19

Chapter Five 20

Conclusions and recommendations 20

REFRENCES 22

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Nations need to measure their progress towards attaining their development goals, be they economic, social and environmental. System of National Accounting s (SNA) has started using GDP as broad measure of welfare and social progress even though GDP was conceived to a momentary measure of a nation’s economy within a particular timeframe and not as a proxy for social welfare and progress^[1] of (Costanza et al., 2009; Stiglitz et al., 2010). This approach to measuring social progress and welfare using GDP is manifestly wrong nonetheless, it is the most commonly used indicator of a country's overall performance. This is illustrated clearly by the common substituting GDP with the phrase ‘standard of living’.

Limitations of GDP

This misappropriation of GDP obviously presents a number of problems chief of which being that every expense is considered to be positive and not differentiate between positive utility – those activities that enhance wellbeing – and negative utility expenditures (Cobb et al., 1995; ^[2] Talberth et al., 2007^[3]).

It goes with out saying that most notable economist have criticized the use of GDP as a proxy of social progress and welfare, these include Dasgupta and Mäler (2000), Dasgupta (2001), Layard (2005), Fleurbaey (2009) and Victor (2010), noted nobel prize winners.

Their criticisms can be summed up in seven major categories.

Accounting Principles

GDP is rough estimate of expenditures rather than positive utility gained from market place activities. Social costs are not accounted for.

Intertemporal (Timeframe) Issues

There is generally a positive correlation between GDP growth, this correlation is however sometimes misconstrued as a causative relationship. Positive GDP figures with a certain period does not necessarily equate to positive social progress.

Lexicographic

GDP per capita increase and the corresponding rise in affluence does not capture psychological factors such as happiness, life satisfaction , access to clean air and nature.

Happiness Literature

Between 1950-1970 OECD countries had a huge increase in GDP and average welfare but this did not translate to a continued increase of wellbeing (law of diminishing returns). Happiness literature has advanced the “Threshold hypothesis” which states that after a certain threshold- level- the cost of growth exceeds the benefits accrued by society. Further, feelings of wellbeing are relative, even in a nation where the mean standard of living in higher than the global average, an individual may still experience feelings of sub par wellbeing if people around experience exceptionally high levels of wellbeing. Finally, individuals have a baseline of wellbeing , it may rise or fall depending on circumstances but after time they return back to their normal baseline of wellbeing^[4] ( hedonic adaptation).

Income distribution

GDP per capita encapsulates the average income of a society and does not take into account variations in income distribution. Marginal utility of income decreases as GDP rises due to market rivalry.

Hidden Economy

GDP being an official aggregate of expenditure within a particular time frame does not take into account the informal economy even though it may contribute to wellbeing. Ti illustrate, consider a stay at home mother who transits to formal employment, she now has to pay for childcare, her children may not receive adequate attention and reduce the family’s wellbeing even though it is theoretically making more money.

Externalities

GDP does not account for externalities such as environmental and resource depletion. Market prices and GDP calculation does not take into account social costs resulting in an inaccurate proxy of social welfare.

GDP’s as a measure of economic welfare can be broadly summed up in two

1. It is an aggregate monetary measure and does not pay attention to distributional issues and ignores human activity or well-being for which no direct or indirect market valuation is available
2. It measure production flow ignoring its impact on stocks. I.e. environmental depletion

Easterlin paradox^[5][6][7]

Easterlin states that within high income nation individuals on the higher spectrum of income report to be happier however when compared between lower income nations, individuals at the corresponding higher level of income did not report to be happier. That is to say, as long as basic needs are met, additional income does not necessarily equate to higher levels of wellbeing.

The implication of the paradox is that wellbeing is relative, that “people are concerned about their relative income and not simply about its absolute level. They want to keep up with the Joneses or if possible to outdo them.”^[8]

This paradox has huge policy implications, the most important being that people are not concerned about their absolute wealth with respects to the global community but rather how they compare within their immediate surroundings, these calls into question the use of GDP and its derivatives as measures of wellbeing.

This paradox has not been without controversy, between 2003-2009 several economist had tried to disprove this paradox, most notably Stevenson, Betsey et all^[9] who found that happiness does grow with income but at a much slower rate. Easterlin^[10] published a paper that re affirmed the paradox, current economics literature does still affirm the paradox.

A region's gross domestic product, or GDP, is one of the ways for measuring the size of its economy. The GDP of a country is defined as the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time (usually a calendar year). It is also considered the sum of value added at every stage of production (the intermediate stages) of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. Until the 1992 the term GNP or gross national product was used in the United States. The two terms GDP and GNP are almost identical - and yet entirely different; GDP (or GDI - Gross Domestic Income) being concerned with the region in which income is generated. That is, what is the market value of all the output produced in a nation, the United States, for example, in one year. GDP concerns itself with where the output is produced and not who produced it. Meanwhile, GNP (or GNI - Gross National Income) is a measure of the accrual of income or the value of the output, produced by the "nationals" of a region. GNP concerns itself with who "owns" the production. If we take the USA as an example again, GNP measures the value of output produced by American firms, regardless of where the firms are located. This compares to GDP which is concerned with where the production takes place and not if the company is an American firm or not. Supposing that a firm can be defined as American in an economic world where most large firms are actually global groups.

The most common approach to measuring and understanding GDP is the expenditure method:

GDP = consumption investment (government spending) (exports − imports), or, GDP = C I G (X-M)

"Gross" means depreciation of capital stock is not included. With depreciation, with net investment instead of gross investment, it is the net domestic product. Consumption and investment in this equation are the expenditure on final goods and services. The exports minus imports part of the equation (often called cumulative exports) then adjusts this by subtracting the part of this expenditure not produced domestically (the imports), and adding back in domestic area (the exports).

Economists (since Keynes) have preferred to split the general consumption term into two parts; private consumption, and public sector (or government) spending. Two advantages of dividing total consumption this way in theoretical macroeconomics are:

Private consumption is a central concern of welfare economics. The private investment and trade portions of the economy are ultimately directed (in mainstream economic models) to increases in long-term private consumption.

If separated from endogenous private consumption, government consumption can be treated as exogenous, so that different government spending levels can be considered within a meaningful macroeconomic framework

Limitations to GDP

Gross domestic product (GDP) is a formula used to determine the size and scope of a country’s economy, created by adding together the total amount of money earned or spent on goods and services produced by citizens of the country. While this number can be a good indication of how well a country is doing financially, there are several limitations of GDP. One of the most important is that this number does not take into account the citizens’ quality of life, or how producing the products and services that make up the GDP impacts the environment, and, therefore, the resources, of the country. This number also does not factor in financial transactions that are not reported to the government, making the reported GDP often lower than what it is in reality.

Oftentimes, GDP is used to determine how wealthy a country is and, therefore, how well-off its citizens are. Using this as a blanket determination of how well a country is doing overall is one of the biggest limitations of GDP. A country that has a high GDP, which is often viewed as a good thing, may also be comprised of a work force that has limited time for pleasurable activities due to the large amount of work required by social or financial pressures. Essentially, gross domestic product only takes into account the finances of a country, and not what is needed to achieve the high numbers or how the amount of money generated is distributed among its citizens.

In the same vein, one of the most substantial limitations of GDP is the fact that the environmental impact of creating enough products or services to achieve a high number is not factored. For a country to achieve a high GDP, it generally has to utilize more resources and create more waste than countries with lower GDPs. This can eventually limit the amount of natural resources readily available to a country, and cause harm to the agricultural products that make up a portion of the GDP. These limitations of GDP, as with the lack of information regarding wealth disbursement and the impact producing high quantities of goods and services has on the overall well-being of the people, are why GDP alone typically fails in providing a well-rounded, truthful picture of a country and its economy.

Every country has what is known as an “underground economy,” which is defined as transactions between two parties that are not reported to the government. As the government has no real means of tracking these dealings, they are not included in the calculations, and this missing information is one of many limitations of GDP. In some areas of the world, the underground economy makes up a large part of the amount of gross domestic product that a country generates. Oftentimes, with the lack of information regarding a country’s underground economy, many places technically have a higher GDP than what is reported.

There are several limitations to GDP and they are discussed in detail below.

Only Market Activity is Included in GDP

A great deal of work done in the home contributes to the nation’s well-being but is not counted in GDP because it has no price tag. One important implication of this exclusion arises when we try to compare the GDPs of developed and less developed countries. Americans are always amazed to hear that the per-capita GDPs of the poorest African countries are less than $250 per year. Surely, no one could survive in America on $5 per week. How can Africans do it? Part of the answer, of course, is that these people are terribly poor. But another part of the answer is that international GDP comparisons are vastly misleading when the two countries differ greatly in the fraction of economic activity that each conducts in organized markets.

This fraction is relatively large in the United States and relatively small in the poorest countries. So when we compare their respective measured GDPs, we are not comparing the same economic activities. Many things that get counted in the U.S. GDP are not counted in the GDPs of very poor nations because they do not pass through markets. It is ludicrous to think that these countries impoverished as they are, survive on what an American thinks of as $5 per week.

A second implication is that GDP statistics take no account of the underground economy—a term that includes not just criminal activities, but also a great deal of legitimate business that is conducted in cash or by barter to escape the tax collector. Naturally, we have no good data on the size of the underground economy. Some observers, however, think that it may amount to 10 percent or more of U.S. GDP—and much more in some foreign countries.

Chapter Two

Introduction to Botswana and China

BOTSWANA

Botswana’s diamond dependent economy has maintained one of the world's highest economic growth rates since independence in 1966.

Since independence in 1966 Botswana has maintained on of the world’s highest economic growth rates. The receded in 2009 during the global crisis after demand for its main commodity, diamonds declined. The country started rebounding in 2010. Due to the countries sound fiscal policies and prudent management, the country has rose from one of the poorest in the world to a prominent middle income country boasting a per capita of $16,600 in 2014. Botswana in ranked as Africa’s credit risk by major credit agencies in the world.

Diamond production is projected to level off within the next decade to a decade and half casts shadows on Botswana’s continued success. Aside from diversifying the economy, the government is also looking into diversifying the diamond industry. She recently signed an agreement with the London diamond trading company to move its operations from London to Botswana potentially making it one of the biggest diamond exchanges in the world.

Economic profile by numbers

Table 2.1 Botswana’s GDP from 2003-2013^[11]

CHINA

In 2010 China became the worlds largest exporter after decades of moving from a closed, centrally driven to a market oriented one.

It reform to came from phasing out collective agriculture and expanded to include market determined priced, decentralization and increased autonomy given to state enterprises, modern banking prices and attracting foreign investment. China has renewed its support for state-owned enterprises in sectors considered important to "economic security," explicitly looking to foster globally competitive industries.

In 2005 China reformed its currency exchange system and pegged in to a basket of currencies.

In 2014 China became the largest economy in the world surpassing that of the USA yet her per capita income still remains below the global average. China faces numerous economic challenges

1. Reducing the high domestic saving rate and low consumption rate
2. Encouraging higher wages for increasing working class
3. Mitigating environmental and social shifts brought about high rapid economic growth
4. An unbalanced population pyramid
5. High credit from fueling the stimulus package

China’s rapid growth rate is set to decline as several factors come to work against it. The Chinese government faces numerous economic challenges, including: (a) reducing its high domestic savings rate and correspondingly low domestic consumption; (b) facilitating higher-wage job opportunities for the aspiring middle class, including rural migrants and increasing numbers of college graduates; (c) reducing corruption and other economic crimes; and (d) containing environmental damage and social strife related to the economy's rapid transformation. Economic development has progressed further in coastal provinces than in the interior, and by 2011 more than 250 million migrant workers and their dependents had relocated to urban areas to find work. One consequence of population control policy is that China is now one of the most rapidly aging countries in the world. Deterioration in the environment - notably air pollution, soil erosion, and the steady fall of the water table, especially in the North - is another long-term problem. China continues to lose arable land because of erosion and economic development.

These are some of litany of problems that the country will have to gapple with in the future.

Botswana and China’s current standard of wellbeing as used by the current standard of social progress and wellbeing are illustrated below.

China in Numbers ^[12]

Chapter Three

Alternatives to GDP

This chapter takes a look at four different alternatives to GDP, Genuine investments/savings and the Human Development Iindex. Each indicator is assessed separately below .

Genuine savings

Growth theory provides the intellectual underpinning for expanded national accounting and, through the measure of genuine saving, an indicator of when economies are on an unsustainable development path. This theory points in useful directions for countries concerned with sustainable development. The genuine savings analysis raises an important set of policy questions that goes beyond the traditional concern with the macroeconomic and microeconomic determinants of savings efforts. The questions of rent capture, public investments of resource revenues, resource tenure policies, and the social costs of pollution emissions are equally germane in determining the overall level of saving, although it is clear that monetary and fiscal policy remain the big levers. This analysis also provides a practical way for natural resource and environmental issues to be discussed in the language that ministries of Finance understand. This may prove to be an important advantage as many resource-dependent economies struggle to achieve their development goals

Genuine savings/investments

Calculating GI

GI distinguishing between measures of current well-being and measures of well-being over time.

GI is defined as net savings after a number of corrections (Bolt et al., 2002):

(i) the value natural resource depletion is deducted;

(ii) environmental and associated cost are added. Ie pollution d health effects;

(iii) education related expenditures are considered as saving;

(iv) net foreign borrowing is deducted, while net official transfers are added;

(v) capital depreciation is deducted.

The first two categories are hard to calculate and are generally estimated.. The World Bank has produced estimates for most countries in the world. The outcome is that, as a general rule, GS are less than half the gross savings. Generally, GI is negative for the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa regions, positive for OECD countries, and the highest for the East Asia/Pacific region (World Bank, 2006).

Criticisms of GI

The main criticism against GI is that natural resource depletion is not considered to a negative factor as long as it is compensated by investment into human capital, further, a positive GI figure does not always correlate with sustainability and environmental protection.

Human Development Index

Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations, it aggregates a number of indicators: GDP per capita (in PPP), life expectancy at birth, adult literacy rate, and combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratios. The inclusion of GDP demonstrates, through a log-transformation and a maximum income limit, a decreasing marginal utility of income.

HDI approach has some arbitrariness by selecting arbitrary components. The latter generates normalized values for each component based on defined upper and lower bounds, and then calculates an arithmetic mean; this results in an index with a value between 0 and 1.

HDI cites that potential development of HDI with additional components is hampered by measurability problems. But income inequality is in any case measurable and clearly an important criterion for evaluating the position of, and changes in, developing countries such as time use (work, leisure, commuting), and available public health services. Several positions have been advanced to adjust the HDI. Other approaches to aggregate the components of the HDI are available, such as the Human Poverty Index, the HDI is considered an improvement over GDP, particularly for assessing changes in developing countries.

Calculating HDI

Four values go into calculating the human development index (HDI) for a particular country. One value is life expectancy at birth. Two other values are related to education. The first is the adult literacy rate—that is, the percentage of adults in the country who are literate. The other measure of education is the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary (that is, post-secondary) education enrollment as a percentage. This is the percentage of all people in the appropriate age groups for primary, secondary, and post-secondary school who are actually enrolled in school. The final value that goes into computing a country’s HDI is the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity, given in U.S. dollars. This is the value of all new final goods and services produced within a country in that year divided by the average population for the same year. The term at purchasing power parity means that the gross domestic product value is adjusted to account for differences in the prices of goods and services in the various countries.

Formula to calculate Human Development Index (HDI) = (Life Expectancy Index X Education Index X Income Index) 1/3 Human Development Index (HDI) is geometric mean of Life Expectancy Index (LEI), Education Index (EI) and Income Index (II).

Criticism of HDI

The main disadvantage of HDI is the lack of sustainability (environmental). HDI is partly intertemporal as it values adult literacy but does not factor in other relevant factors such as capital stock depletion and as such is not as comprehensive as the above mentioned indices.

Chapter Four

This chapter takes a look at GDP vis-à-vis GPI and HDI and asseses what happens to the countries’ state of social welfare when alternate measure are used. Each country will be looked at separately. Questions to be discussed in this chapter are

1. What is the correlation and or relationship between the alternative economic indicator and GDP
2. Is there a huge deviation from what GDP alluded to as the standard of social welfare and what the alternative indicator is presenting

HDI

Botswana

The graph below demonstrates the relationship between GDP and HDI in Botswana. It can easily be garnered that there is a positive correlation between GDP and HDI. When a regression is run to see how close the relationship is between the two, we get an R squared of 0.67 (detailed results displayed below) which shows that there is clear and high positive correlation between the two

Graph 4.1 GDB of Botswana vs HDI

Table 4.1 Botswana GDP vs HDI regression results.

China

The graph below demonstrates the relationship between GDP and HDI in China. It can easily be garnered that there is a strong positive correlation between GDP and HDI. When a regression is run to see how close the relationship is between the two, we get an R squared of 0.95 (detailed results displayed below) which shows that there is clear and high positive correlation between the two

Graph 4.1 GDB of China vs HDI

Table 4.2 China GDP vs HDI regression results

Interpretation of HDI results

From the regression results, we can see that there is indeed a correlation between HDI and GDP. The correlation is stronger in the case of China but both sets of results do present a compelling argument that there is a correlation between the two.

Genuine Savings

Botswana

From there results below there seems to be a slight positive correlation between GDP and GS. This could however be attributed to the fact that GS is normally a result of GDP. How much a country decides to put aside for future generations is normally limited by the amount of GDP a country has accrued over the past year and other budgetary factors like austerity measures and spending priorities. The regression results as displayed below also allude to the fact there is a slight correlation.

Graph 4.1 GDB of Botswana vs GS

Table 4.3 Botswana GDP vs GS regression results

China

The results are displayed below.

Table 4.4 Botswana GDP vs GS regression results

Interpretation of GS results

From the regression results, we can see that there is slight a correlation between GS and GDP. The correlation is stronger in the case of China but both sets of results do not present a compelling enough correlation between GS and GDP.

Chapter Five

Conclusions and recommendations

Research has shown that it is possible to collect meaningful and reliable data on subjective as well as objective well-being. Subjective well-being encompasses different aspects (cognitive evaluations of one’s life, happiness, satisfaction, positive emotions such as joy and pride, and negative emotions such as pain and worry): each of them should be measured separately to derive a more comprehensive appreciation of people’s lives. Quantitative measures of these subjective aspects hold the promise of delivering not just a good measure of quality of life per se, but also a better understanding of its determinants, reaching beyond people’s income and material conditions. Despite the persistence of many unresolved issues, these subjective measures provide important information about quality of life. Because of this, the types of question that have proved their value within small-scale and unofficial surveys should be included in larger-scale surveys undertaken by official statistical offices.

A pragmatic approach is needed to measure social progress and welfare in Botswana and China

Our measurement system needs to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being. And measures of well-being should be put in a context of sustainability. Despite deficiencies in our measures of production, we know much more about them than about well-being. Changing emphasis does not mean dismissing GDP and production measures. They emerged from concerns about market production and employment; they continue to provide answers to many important questions such as monitoring economic activity. But emphasising well-being is important because there appears to be an increasing gap between the information contained in aggregate GDP data and what counts for common people’s well-being.

This means working towards the development of a statistical system that complements measures of market activity by measures centred on people’s well-being and by measures that capture sustainability. Such a system must, of necessity, be plural – because no single measure can summarize something as complex as the well-being of the members of society, our system of measurement must encompass a range of different measures. The issue of aggregation across dimensions (that is to say, how we add up, for example, a measure of health with a measure of consumption of conventional goods), while important, is subordinate to the establishment of a broad statistical system that captures as many of the relevant dimensions as possible. Such a system should not just measure average levels of wellbeing within a given community, and how they change over time, but also document the diversity of peoples’ experiences and the linkages across various dimensions of people’s life. There are several dimensions to well-being but a good place to start is the measurement of material well-being or living standards.

Measuring and assessing sustainability has been a central concern of the thesis. Sustainability poses the challenge of determining if at least the current level of wellbeing can be maintained for future generations. By its very nature, sustainability involves the future and its assessment involves many assumptions and normative choices. This is further complicated by the fact that at least some aspects of environmental sustainability(notably climate change) is affected by interactions between the socio-economic and environmental models followed by different countries. The issue is indeed complex, more complex than the already complicated issue of measuring current well-being or performance.

The assessment of sustainability is complementary to the question of current well-being or economic performance, and must be examined separately. This may sound trivial and yet it deserves emphasis, because some existing approaches fail to adopt this principle, leading to potentially confusing messages. For instance, confusion may arise when one tries to combine current well-being and sustainability into a single indicator. To take an analogy, when driving a car, a meter that added up in one single number the current speed of the vehicle and the remaining level of gasoline would not be of any help to the driver.

Both pieces of information are critical and need to be displayed in distinct, clearly visible areas of the dashboard.

Overall, the alternative measure presented here do not present a viable alternative for GDP. HDI is possibly viable but the problem is that it does not effectively capture economic data though there is a correlation between it and GDP.

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12. http://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/default.asp accessed APril 5 2014 ↑

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