Gross national product

About: Gross national product is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2249 publications have been published within this topic receiving 71610 citations. The topic is also known as: GNP.

The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital

Abstract: The services of ecological systems and the natural capital stocks that produce them are critical to the functioning of the Earth's life-support system. They contribute to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, and therefore represent part of the total economic value of the planet. We have estimated the current economic value of 17 ecosystem services for 16 biomes, based on published studies and a few original calculations. For the entire biosphere, the value (most of which is outside the market) is estimated to be in the range of US$16-54 trillion (10^(12)) per year, with an average of US$33 trillion per year. Because of the nature of the uncertainties, this must be considered a minimum estimate. Global gross national product total is around US$18 trillion per year.

The Quality of American Life: Perceptions, Evaluations, and Satisfactions

Abstract: benefits require a fundamental recasting of economic and sociopolitical structures lest permanent stagflation erode the impact of present and future allocations. Clearly, when social welfare expenditures in the United States have increased from under $9,000 million in 1940 to over $200,000 million in 1973, and when total government spending exclusive of defense now absorbs roughly 32 percent of national income, it is obvious that further advances in welfare require basic structural changes. Without these, further extension of the welfare state will become counterproductive. Far from limiting himself to the decline of economic surplus, the author discusses a variety of other issues, such as changes in the stratification system, the weakening of political regimes and the emergence of an ethic of hedonistic consumerism, which are connected with the rise of the welfare state. He shows, for example, that the format of conventional interest-group politics has been undermined by the welfare state. While it is true that the claims and expectations rooted in a person's occupation remain central, they are now crisscrossed by contradictory or competing pulls that arise out of claims for welfare benefits. It is much more difficult than in the past for a person to calculate rationally where his political interests lie. "A person's linkage to the mode of production . . . is (now) based both on his occupation and on the institutions of social welfare" (p. 83). This may help account for the decline of relatively stable class-based politics, and the increase of independent voters in recent decades, as well as for the strains in the functioning of electoral and parliamentary institutions in the recent period. Janowitz concludes with a series of observations on the need to increase a welfare society's ability to deal with the problems he has outlined. Though somewhat vague in detail, one nevertheless gathers that he favors both large-scale planning efforts and increasing citizens' participation through self-regulation. Space does not allow me to even indicate the many areas in which I differ from Janowitz; for example, his definition of the welfare state as any state that allocates "at least 8 to 1o percent of the gross national product to welfare" (p. 2) seems inadequate, since this definition would make Kuwait and Albania into welfare states. But my main object is to alert the reader that this work is indispensable for any social scientist concerned with our current predicaments, and especially for those among us who are committed to the idea of the welfare system and yet have begun to realize that spending is not enough. LEwIs A. COSER State University of New York at Stony Brook

For The Common Good: Redirecting The Economy Towards Community, The Environment And A Sustainable Future

Abstract: The scale of human activity in the biosphere has grown too large. The perspective is that change is needed in the approach to economic activity: "correction and expansion a more empirical and historical attitude less pretense on being science and willingness to subordinate the market to purposes that it is not geared to determine." The economic proposal is concerned with the extent to which the economy supports healthy communities; it is related to the 19th-century Roman Catholic economic theory of Pesch. It is critical of contemporary economics and reflects the concerns of an economist and a theologian. The 4 parts to the books differentiate between the present state of economics as a deductive science and the consequences for the market measures of success homoeconomicus and the land in Part I and an alternative approach in Part II. The alternative is not to shape economics to science but to the realities of the world with the idea that better abstractions will evolve. Part III addresses policies in the US and their implications. Part IV pertains to the attainment of the objectives in an alternative economy. The vision is participatory and sustainable. The appendix provides an index of sustainable welfare between 1950-86 annually which includes net capital growth foreign versus domestic capital and environmental damage; there are 24 separate measures to show how to improve welfare. The caveats and limitations are also discussed. Also included for 1950-86 annually is an index of income inequality the value of services and highways public expenditures on health and education counted as personal consumption defensive private expenditures on health and education the cost of commuting the cost of urbanization the cost of air pollution the loss of agricultural land energy consumption as a measure of longterm environmental damage and net capital growth. The results show that the true health of the economy is discouraging. The generalized income measure/capita increased .84%/year between 1951-60 increased 2.01% between 1960-70 or .50% slower than the gross national product growth for the same period declined .14% between 1970-80 and declined 1.26% during the 1980s. This pattern is stable even with the exclusion of resource depletion and environmental damage.

International expansion through start-up or through acquisition : An organizational learning perspective

Abstract: This study brings a fresh approach—a learning perspective—to the literature examining whether firms expand internationally through start-ups or acquisitions. Hypotheses concern how this strategic c...

The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States

Abstract: The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States marked the beginning of the study of our postindustrial information society. Austrian-born economist Fritz Machlup had focused his research on the patent system, but he came to realize that patents were simply one part of a much bigger "knowledge economy." He then expanded the scope of his work to evaluate everything from stationery and typewriters to advertising to presidential addresses--anything that involved the activity of telling anyone anything. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States then revealed the new and startling shape of the U.S. economy. Machlup's cool appraisal of the data showed that the knowledge industry accounted for nearly 29 percent of the U.S. gross national product, and that 43 percent of the civilian labor force consisted of knowledge transmitters or full-time knowledge receivers. Indeed, the proportion of the labor force involved in the knowledge economy increased from 11 to 32 percent between 1900 and 1959--a monumental shift. Beyond documenting this revolution, Machlup founded the wholly new field of information economics. The transformation to a knowledge economy has resonated throughout the rest of the century, especially with the rise of the Internet. As two recent observers noted, "Information goods--from movies and music to software code and stock quotes--have supplanted industrial goods as the key drivers of world markets." Continued study of this change and its effects is testament to Fritz Machlup's pioneering work.