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Japan GDP shake-up knocking world's growth indicator

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Many EU countries also introduced new sources of GDP and updated methods, including a new, EU-wide way of measuring illegal or underground activities such as the drug trade and prostitution.

If Japan decides to include these in their new measurements I'll bet they proclaim a booming economy. Oh but wait, there are no drugs or prostitutes in Japan. My mistake...carry on.

6 ( +9 / -3 )

For Japan public spending under Abenomics and Bank of Japan adopting negative interest rate policy is the solid proof that economy is not growing or there is a negative growth.

3 ( +5 / -2 )

A bigger proportion of GDP can be accounted for by the expenditure used to put right or overcome the problems of previous growth. That's why it appears we are going nowhere fast even when GDP increases.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

It's a terrible system of measureing "progress" - purely based on quantity - not quality.

All kinds of social and environmaental bads add to GDP - clear cut an ancient forest - increase in GDP. Even increased crime and accociated security, court and prison spending increased GDP. Crazy. We need to world governments to follow a Bhutan type measure of development Gross National Happiness. Others include Happy Planet Index.

GDP is a very crude narrow minded capitalist measure of a nation's economic activity, and does nothing to measure the quality of development.

5 ( +8 / -3 )

I agree here, the definition of GDP needs to be completely overhauled. It was developed as a measure for industrial output and fails spectacularly to measure things like IP, R&D, and value added inputs. It even fails completely when taking into account globalized supply chains. In fact, it's actually completely ludicrous that we still even use GDP at all

3 ( +4 / -1 )

Can't generate growth so change the stats. Sure to work as well here as it does in China.

1 ( +5 / -4 )

Japan is in recession from 1991, simple and true.

-2 ( +4 / -6 )

The article says "Japan is eyeing an overhaul of how it measures growth in its economy", but this should read "Abe" instead of "Japan".

Abenomics has failed and the GDP figures accurately reflect its failure. Now Abe is trying to fiddle the figures so that his constant claims of success in the face of all the facts don't make him a laughing stock.

3 ( +5 / -2 )

Score, exactly. So he can claim his arrows are working.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Scrote, yep, this has Abe written all over it. When vowing, insisting and urging fails, it's time to re-interpret or just make stuff up.

2 ( +4 / -2 )

IF NUMBERS can give happiness, life is over.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

There is no country in the world today that has an economy that is growing very fast. Even such countries that have relatively high GDP growth have seen their growth slow. Countries such as China and India, whose GDP growth is (officially) relatively high compared to any advanced country have hundreds of millions of people living in poverty. Any "developing" country with 6% or 7% growth will still remain a developing country because of population growth and inflation.

There is no accurate way of measuring GDP and different countries have different ways of measuring it, and in some countries the figures are notoriously inaccurate anyway because they do not keep accurate figures. Some influential economists estimate that China's real GDP growth is only half of official government figures.

Just measuring industrial output is meaningless and outdated; there are many other parts of the economy that have to be considered to determine how wealthy a country is.

2 ( +3 / -1 )

Japanese demographics dominate! Less people and more aged means a drop in GDP going forward as Japan has neither the resources nor the massive export growth/industry that it once had.....

0 ( +1 / -1 )

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