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Book review: GDP: a brief but affectionate history by Diane Coyle

Lawlor, Eilís (2014) Book review: GDP: a brief but affectionate history by Diane Coyle. LSE Review of Books (17 Jun 2014). Website.

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Abstract

Why did the size of the U.S. economy increase by 3 per cent on one day in mid-2013–or Ghana’s balloon by 60 per cent overnight in 2010? Why did the U.K. financial industry show its fastest expansion ever at the end of 2008–just as the world’s financial system went into meltdown? The answers to all these questions lie in the way we define and measure national economies around the world: Gross Domestic Product. With this Brief but affectionate History, Diane Coyle aims to tell the story of GDP, making sense of a statistic that appears constantly in the news, business, and politics, and that seems to rule our lives–but that hardly anyone actually understands. Eilís Lawlor finds that the strongest part of the book charts the development of national accounting from the 17th century through to the creation of GDP itself and its literal and metaphorical rises and falls in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Item Type: Online resource (Website)
Official URL: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/
Additional Information: © 2014 The Author(s) CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Divisions: LSE
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HA Statistics
H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
J Political Science > JC Political theory
J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General)
Date Deposited: 27 Apr 2017 09:19
Last Modified: 11 Dec 2024 14:01
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/74497

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