groos domestic product is not a good indicator of standard living?

Answer 1

GDP is not entirely a good indicator of standard of living. My old prof was pretty contemporary and what he said in lecture made sense to me. This is what he said, "Don't be fooled by the rocks that you've got"

Haha, somewhat out of the context but it is true. GDP does not measure the crime rates (blue/white collar crime etc), nor does it measures the environmental degradation faced by a country. As some of these data are difficult to record, therefore you can't sole judge the standard of living of a country measure by the GDP or GNP, there are a lot of issues that goes unrecorded.

Answer 2

With out even considering social well being GDP is an imperfect measure. Standard of living depends on quality of housing, roads , water etc. which take decades to build. Ireland has one of the highest GDP per capita right now, but it is new found prosperity and they have not had time to upgrade their infrastructure so their standard of living is not as high as the numbers would indicate. If the GDP is achieved by everybody working long hours the standard of living is less than a country with the same GDP and only one worker per family or working fewer hours. Intra country comparison use the exchange rate which depend on trade flows, and may be very different from the domestic purchasing power of the currency .

Answer 3

The Gross Domest Product (GDP) is not designed to measure a country's living standards. Rather, it is used to measure the total value of the goods and services produced in that country over a given time period (a year). For instance, the GDP of the United States in 2005 was $12.45 trillion. That means that for the entire year of 2005, $12.45 trillion worth of goods and services was produced. It has absolutely no intrinsic value for measuring living standards. The value of the GDP could be entirely export-related, meaning that the nation's people never enjoy any of the products or services. Or perhaps those products and services are enjoyed only by the richest class of people.

To measure standards of living, one would need to use surveys of American households, household income data, the GINI coefficient for that nation (the GINI coefficient measures equality (or lack of) in incomes in a nation), and whatever other sources of data which are useful.

Answer 4

No. Gross domestic product (GDP) is not at all any indicator.of standard of living. GDP per head at constant prices (real gdp per head rather than the nominal gdp per head) is an indicator of level of standard of living. However, better indicator of standard of living is the rate of change per year in the real gdp per head provided that the average gdp has increased for each deciles of income class from the lowest to the top.There is no other better measure of standard of living than the change in the real GDP across income levels. There are some indicators like quality of life index. But these are more vague and imprecise, But they may be useful for comparing one country with another.