Answer Reader asked: How did the GDP 300 years ago in the UK calculated?

Editor: Comrade:

Recently, I saw the British GDP in 2020 (GDP) the largest decline in 300 years. But GDP is a concept of modern economics. It is impossible for Britain to have GDP statistics more than 300 years ago. When will GDP be proposed? How did the earlier data calculated?

Sichuan reader Lin Mengdie

GDP (GDP) refers to the value of all the final products and labor produced by a country in a certain period (such as one year). It is the core indicator of the national economic accounting and an important indicator of the national economic conditions and development level. The concept of GDP in modern economics is the first to systematically sort out and elaborate by Russian American economist Simon Smith Kuzhnes. After the Bretton Forest Conference in 1944, GDP became an important tool for measuring the national economy.

The statistics of GDP have three calculation methods, that is, to count the national economic aggregate from the three different aspects of the national economy's production, income and expenditure. According to the production calculation method, GDP is the total value -added of the production field, which is equivalent to minus the middle consumption in the production process; according to the income algorithm, GDP = worker remuneration+net production tax+fixed asset depreciation+operating surplus; According to the expenditure calculation algorithm, GDP = final consumption+total capital formation+net export. Theoretically, the results obtained by the above three calculation methods should be the same.

Since the above GDP statistics method, as long as the original data is possessed, you can calculate the GDP of different periods. The statistical packet released by the Bank of England's British Bank of England covers various British macro data estimates since the late 11th century, including the British GDP statistics of nearly a thousand years. For example, the earliest British GDP data in the Bank of England's data packet was 1270 years. At that time, the British GDP was estimated at the 2013 market price, about 3.518 billion pounds. Media reported that the British GDP in 2020 set the biggest decline in more than 300 years, and it was the data released by the Bank of England. (Wang Pinzhi)

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