Last week I talked about the problem of national productivity measurement when we fail to count lots of ‘intangibles.
Musing further, I got to thinking about companies like Google and Yahoo who give away many of their services for free (at least to the end user at point of use). Google and Yahoo put lots of energy and resources into these services – and they clearly benefit the US economy – but they don’t get counted in the official GDP figure.
This situation clearly affects the US – but also lots of other developed countries.
We need to think again about how we measure national productivity.