This work is an entry for the second edition of Sage's Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society. It provides an explanation of the concepts of gross domestic product and gross national product, their economic significance and their ethical implications. Although both GDP and GNP are technical...

Expectations and information about the growth of GDP per capita have a large influence on decisions made by private and public economic agents. It will be argued here that GDP (per capita) is far from a robust indicator of social welfare, and that its use as such must be regarded as a serious...

While GDP is the appropriate measure of output, I argue that Weitzman's NDP (WNDP) - nominal net domestic product deflated by the price of consumption - is the appropriate measure of welfare. Total factor productivity (TFP) growth measures the shift in the GDP frontier, and there is an analogous...

Efforts to assess the possibilities for decoupling economic growth from negative environmental impacts have examined their historical relationship, with varying and inconclusive results. Part of the problem is ambiguity about definitions of environmental impacts, e.g. whether to use territorial...