econcrit: Financial activity as a "net cost to the wider economy"

Friday, March 9, 2018

Financial activity as a "net cost to the wider economy"

If you google FGDP you get results for the "Faculty of General Dental Practice".

If you google FGDP (economics) you get results for "GDP (economics)" and the option to "Search instead for FGDP (economics)".

If you click the option you get what you want (but Google still asks "Did you mean: GDP (economics)"). I got

The Financialization of GDP: Implications for Economic Theory and Policy, at Google Books;
Kicking Away the (Statistical) Ladder, at Developing Economics;
The Financialization of GDP and its Implications for Macroeconomic Debates, a PDF by Jacob Assa.

along with a bunch of dentist stuff.

The third item is not the same PDF we saw yesterday. The second item is an online article with a couple graphs I'll show tomorrow. The first item is a book by Jacob Assa. Excerpts from the Foreword, below.

Via Google Books: The Financialization of GDP: Implications for Economic Theory and Policy by Jacob Assa.

From the Foreword by Brett Christophers:

The idea that contemporary capitalism represents a form of financialized capitalism is problematic, Assa maintains, because the statistical measure most commonly employed to demonstrate such financialization -- gross domestic product, of which finance is estimated to have accounted for an increasing proportional quantum -- has itself been financialized. Hence: "the financialization of GDP."

But what does Assa mean by this? What he means is that the way in which GDP is calculated has been changed in recent decades in such a way as to boost the relative contribution to GDP that the financial sector is seen to make, regardless of any actual transformation in the underlying economy...

His most distinctive contribution in this book ... is to at once recognize the problematic nature of the existing statistical framing and to suggest an alternative approach to GDP measurement.

While Assa does not couch it in these terms, his alternative harks back to the understanding of finance contained in the seminal texts of classical Western political economy -- those of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx -- wherein finance was conceptualized as non-value-adding.

Assa's preferred metric -- final GDP (FGDP) -- treats financial activities not as a positive economic output ... but instead as an intermediate input -- and thus as a net cost to the wider economy.

Assa suggests that this alternative treatment of the financial sector potentially helps to resolve some key statistical quandaries within contemporary macroeconomics. One is the much-discussed phenomenon of "jobless growth": the apparent curiosity of periods of economic growth coinciding with flat or declining levels of employment. For Assa, there is no curiosity: according to his FGDP measure ... the economy has not in fact been growing during the periods in question...