Is GDP a Relevant Social Welfare Indicator? A Savers-Spenders Theory Approach

Emmanuel Thibault

No 16-651, TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE)

Abstract: The use of GDP as the main index of progress and welfare of a country has been the subject of a long debate amongst economists. Using and extending the saversspenders theory recently popularized by Mankiw (2000, AER), we analyze the theoretical relationships between GDP and the welfare of a society. This analysis is undertaken using several different overlapping generations models which all take into account the great heterogeneity of consumer behavior observed in the data (different labor supply choices, different degrees of altruism and/or different degrees of impatience to consume). The results indicate that GDP (per capita) is often a relevant index and is always a decent social welfare indicator.

Keywords: Growth models; Heterogeneity of preferences; Welfare; Product accounts and wealth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 D91 J22 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/docu ... /2016/wp_tse_651.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Is GDP a Relevant Social Welfare Indicator? A Savers–Spenders Theory Approach (2017)
Journal Article: Is GDP a Relevant Social Welfare Indicator? A Savers—Spenders Theory Approach (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tse:wpaper:30477

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().