US-China Competition: GDP Can Be Misleading

(23 September 2021) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has for years been the key economic indicator used for cross-country comparisons. The value of GDP shows how large a country's economy is, and per capita GDP is used to compare countries' productivity and technological development. However, emphasis on these directly measurable indicators often obscures qualitative characteristics of development that can significantly affect the estimates of a country's economic potential. With China becoming an...