Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.

Creative destruction can apply to economic concepts as well. And this downturn offers an excellent opportunity to get rid of one that has long outlived its usefulness: gross domestic product. G.D.P. is one measure of national income, of how much wealth Americans make, and it’s a deeply foolish indicator of how the economy is doing. It ought to join buggy.

We (Saint Kitts and Nevis) have one of the highest per capita GDP's in the entire Caribbean. We continue to attract more foreign direct investment than any other Caribbean nation despite the global economic downturn. And our reputation for sound economic management has been repeatedly affirmed by the international financial community just as you (Ma Ying-jeou) alluded to earlier, as a result of the collaboration between our nations (Saint Kitts and Nevis and the Republic of China).

Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country's ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.

Though the United States is one of the world’s richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration: Basic Survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.”

GDP does not and cannot tell the whole story. Activities that do not require money changing hands are not counted as part of GDP — which means that, in effect, many of the things real human beings cherish most are treated as having no value. By contrast, money spent on weapons of

Honestly speaking, most people do not keep their eyes on GDP growth all the time. What they care more about are the things that happen in their everyday life, like housing, employment, income, education, medical services and the environment. Therefore, the government must always plan and carry out its work according to the people’s wish.

Today, Singapore is at a high economic level, compared to most other countries. By international standards, we have built excellent systems of education, housing, healthcare and transport. But our circumstances are changing, technology is advancing and our population is ageing fast. So we cannot afford to cruise along. We must continue to do our best - to improve, upgrade and transform Singapore. I am convinced we can and we must, do better

I totally agree with Mr. Zhu's assessment of transitioning to a productivity, innovation driven economy. That's the only way that's going to sustain growth in the long run. So that's a good thing. But... renewables or digitization in the short term... can't possibly displace real estate as a provider for growth and employment in the way that it had in the last 10 years or so. Second, services right now... only accounts for half of GDP and only 48% of employment. That number is 80% in advanced economies, so you can imagine a whole amount of room for also absorbing the youth who are underemployed, highly educated. They account for a more educated skill force than manufacturing. And you also have almost a billion people who haven't really reached middle income by international standards, living under $300 per month. ...So I could go on and on, when even Japan and Korea leveled off their growth, their productivity as a share of... the US was already 80% and China is still very low... a lot of room for convergence. ...[W]e want to separate the cyclical problems of demand from some of the longer term challenges.

A country’s wealth comes not from taxes but from production.

For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

So why does the United Nations consider the US as a developed economy when its own statistics so clearly suggest otherwise? One might argue that it’s about simple wealth, or gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of the economy, per capita. But if that were the measure of development then European countries such as Romania, Hungary and Slovakia should not qualify for the term “developed economy” while Bermuda, Qatar, Singapore and China should all make the list. Besides, GDP per capita is no reliable measure of wellbeing in a country like the US where the richest 5% of people own two-thirds of the national wealth.

The nation's economic welfare depends largely upon our ability to make and sell the exports necessary to buy the imports we need to feed our people and keep our industry going. Our costs of production are of vital importance and they depend to a considerable extent on the amount which industry has to pay in profits, salaries and wages. These in turn in the form of individual incomes affect the total volume of money available in relation to the quantity of goods... It is essential, therefore, that there should be no further general increase in the level of personal incomes without at least a corresponding increase in the volume of production. Unless we are prepared to check any such tendency we shall find ourselves unable to fulfil our export task owing to the rise in costs, which will also be reflected in rising prices on the home market.

general trend is toward products that use fewer atoms. We might not notice this because, while individual items use less material, we use more items as the economy expands and we thus accumulate more stuff in total. However, the total amount of material we use per GDP dollar is going down, which means we use less material for greater value. The ratio of mass needed to generate a unit of GDP has been falling for 150 years, declining even faster in the last two decades. In 1870 it took 4 kilograms of stuff to generate one unit of the U.S.’s GDP. In 1930 it took only one kilogram. Recently the value of GDP per kilogram of inputs rose from $1.64 in 1977 to $3.58 in 2000 — a doubling of dematerialization in 23 years.