There's plenty of material on that already.
For that reason, we have people like Joseph Stiglitz (a very
interesting jew) and Amartya Sen (a very interesting Indian)
working together now to come up with a more useful indicator than
those already in practice like HDI, which is actually used in
UN.
In fact, GDP is widely known to be a very lousy indicator with
plenty of loopholes that you just mentioned, can be exploited,
misinterpreted and lied upon.
And now news has come that China may have been inflating its
growth rate, and that tells as much.
Besides, it is perplexing to me why people are fixated on GDP.
By definition, it just means "value of everything produced
within the borders".As you know, one can just produce in
Singapore, and then ship it away. And our overseas assets aren't
counted in this measure. And including the production of a robot to
replace a spoilt one isn't gonna raise our income level, so capital
depreciation should not be included also!
I'm sure you guys have heard of GNP and NNI (Net National
Income) which are based on GDP but in fact take into account of all
these problems. But we don't use those as measures as widely.
"The Singapore Experience"
