Decline In Gross Domestic Product Research Articles

The need for 'convention' in environmental valuation

The rate of growth or decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is reported quarterly in New Zealand and regarded as the paramount measure of how the nation is faring. However, the welfare of New Zealanders is determined by more than economic factors and the non-economic portion is not taken into account when only GDP, which measures monetary exchanges in the market place, is used as a gauge. Non-economic contributions to welfare come from many sources including unpaid work and the natural environment ? from which the economy extracts resources and returns wastes. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) endeavours to develop measures for such items and then adjust GDP to reflect their contribution. GPIs have been constructed for a number of countries and they all show such contributions are considerable, though difficult to measure. No 'convention' has been established for the constructing of a GPI to make the process more systematic and ensure the appropriate data are collected. This paper looks specifically at the approaches taken to value the natural capital and ecosystem services that have contributed to welfare over the 1970?2005 period in New Zealand, and, whether such measures could be more generic.

Southeast Asia: Towards a Sustained Recovery?

Asia's astonishing bounce-back was the cover story of the Economist at the end of August 1999. In the latter part of 1999, other daily and weekly journals covering Asian affairs also proclaimed the economic crisis to be over; some declared the patients not just to be out of intensive care but ready to be discharged from the convalescent home. But while there appears to be con vincing evidence of a remarkable turnaround in South Korea, was this really the case for the worst affected Southeast Asian economies? The Indonesian economy, which had suffered the largest decline in gross domestic product (GDP) in 1998 was buffeted by two severe shocks in August and September 1999, which made predictions of a rapid return to positive growth look distinctly dubious. On the one hand, the Bank Bali scandal seemed to demonstrate that officials close to President Habibie were apparently just as corruption-prone as were those around former President Soeharto, while the post-election turmoil in East Timor severely damaged the reputation, at home and abroad, of both the army and the civilian administration. Both events led to a fall in the value of the rupiah and fears that investor confidence, still very fragile, would be further undermined. In October 1999, the People's Consultative Assembly refused to accept President's Habibie's account of his brief term in office, whereupon he withdrew from the presidential election. The subsequent ballot led to the election of the well-known Islamic leader and democracy activist, Abdurrahman Wahid, as president. Megawati Soekarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesia's first president, whose party had garnered the largest number of votes in the June elections, became the vice-president. But the honeymoon period for the new team was brief, and by early December the increasingly strident calls for a referendum in Aceh, and continued religious violence in the province of Maluku, were causing widespread fears that the Indonesian state was teetering on the verge of disintegration. If we judge the severity of the crisis by the decline in real GDP in 1998, then both Thailand (-9.4 per cent) and Malaysia (-7.5 per cent) were only slightly less badly affected than Indonesia (-13.7 per cent). Although by the

The Philippine Economy In 1992

Waiting for the recovery was the main event for many watchers of the Philippine economy in 1992. Total output had declined in 1991, a contraction that arose from a combination of economic and non-economic factors. In response to a serious balance-of-payments problem, the government installed a stabilization programme designed to disinflate the economy. It sharply reduced its purchases of goods and services, and the growth in money supply. To raise revenues and to check the trade deficit, it imposed an import levy. The fiscal and monetary shocks, plus the adverse effects on production of a string of natural disasters, which occurred in the second half of the year, all contributed to the decline in gross domestic product (GDP), adjusted for inflation in 1991.