by The gross national income (GNI), previously known as gross national product (GNP), is the total domestic and foreign output claimed by residents of a country, consisting of gross domestic product (GDP), plus factor incomes earned by foreign residents, minus income earned in the domestic economy by non-residents.
GNI is the total amount of money earned by a nation’s people and businesses. It is used to measure and track a nation’s wealth from year to year. The number includes the nation’s gross domestic product plus the income it receives from overseas sources.
GNI is an alternative to gross domestic product (GDP) as a means of measuring and tracking a nation’s wealth and is considered a more accurate indicator for some nations.
Gross national product (GNP) is the market value of all the goods and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens of a country. Unlike gross domestic product (GDP), which defines production based on the geographical location of production, GNP indicates allocated production based on location of ownership. In fact it calculates income by the location of ownership and residence, and so its name is also the less ambiguous gross national income.
GNP is an economic statistic that is equal to GDP plus any income earned by residents from overseas investments minus income earned within the domestic economy by overseas residents.
GNP does not distinguish between qualitative improvements in the state of the technical arts (e.g., increasing computer processing speeds), and quantitative increases in goods (e.g., number of computers produced), and considers both to be forms of “economic growth”.
The term gross national income (GNI) has gradually replaced the Gross national product (GNP) in international statistics. While being conceptually identical, the precise calculation method has evolved at the same time as the name change.
Criticism of gross national product
The gross national product (GNP) measures the welfare of a nation’s economy through the aggregate of products and services produced in that nation. Although GNP is a proficient measurement of the magnitude of the economy, many economists, environmentalists and citizens have been arguing the validity of the GNP in respect to measuring welfare.
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize–winning economist, states that this standard measurement for any national economy has become deficient as a measure of long-term economic health in our recently resource-driven and globalizing world. Critics suggest that GNP often includes the environment on the wrong side of the balance sheet because if someone first pollutes and then another person cleans the pollution, both activities add to GNP making environmental degradation frequently look good for the economy.
Critics of mainstream economics complain that GNP compiles spending that makes us worse off, spending that allows us to stay in the same place, and spending that makes us better off all in a single measure, giving a nation no clue if they are making progress or not.
Manfred Max-Neef, Chilean economist, explains that politicians feel that it is irrelevant whether the spending is productive, unproductive, or destructive. In this sense, it is common to see political policies that call to depredate a natural resource in order to increase the GNP. To take into account the environmental depredation and resource depletion, there is a call to shift away from the traditional GNP and construct an assessment of national product that takes into account environmental effects.
Need
Many people are calling for a green national product that would indicate if activities benefit or harm the economy and well-being. This green national product would revolve around the social and economic issues on which many green movements have focused: care for the earth and all that sustain it. This new national product would differ from the traditional GNP by addressing both the sustainability and well-being of the planet and its inhabitants. It is essential that this system takes into account natural capital, which is currently hidden from our traditional measurement.
Green GNP
Is an economic and environmental accounting framework which measures the national wealth by accounting for exhaustion of natural resources and degradation of environment and investment in environment support.
The goal of Green GDP is one of the dreams of every economist. An economist who could actually come up with a serious theory of Green GDP would go down in history as the one of the greatest economists ever!
That’s because in the big picture, “externalities” costs or benefits which are not born by the person performing the economic action which causes them are very important in determining the wealth of a society. But economists are very limited in their ability to study them.
Externalities include things like the cost imposed on society by potentially harmful emissions into the common spaces.
But Green GDP is cheap ideological political propaganda masquerading as economic science.
As economics, it is pure rubbish. It manufactures silly economic cost estimates with absolutely no scientific basis, based purely on continually changing “narratives”, invented by activists, and kept alive (as people eventually discover that their predictions are all falsified by reality) by
(a) Altering the public record of what they were saying
(b) Emotionalist propaganda to appeal to those who lack the intellectual curiosity to find out the facts. All this solely to support the authoritarian political agenda of its promoters.
