Oscar García Muñoz, follow it on other blogs here .

Dusting also provides national wealth

Do not give many turns to a business journal to meet the mother of all data: gross domestic product (GDP). The traditional way to calculate the wealth of countries, developed by economist Simon Kuznets in the thirties of last century, draws on the activities that can be measured as monetary flows: consumption and investment (public and private) and trade with abroad.

At the time, Kuznets and warned against measuring other components such as maintenance work home or family care. However, bring richness, in a manner which can not be measured because they are not generated costs. For example, a friend told me the case of an acquaintance, he earned a salary of 800 euros per month in Spain, just what it cost the same child care center. He decided to stop working, because it saved the cost of daycare and enjoyed his son's childhood.

However, GDP measures not only these activities are not monetary, but neither is it a fact that allows to know if a country has an equitable distribution of wealth or, conversely, there are deep social divides. Numerous studies indicate that the concentration of wealth in a minority has accelerated in the world (have you ever wondered how many companies in the Dow Jones could have bought Madoff with the 35,000 million dollars that says he embezzled?). Perhaps in this emerging reality more visible, but is emerging little by little, a middle class, while in Europe this phenomenon, there also is more blurred by social protection systems.

However, a recent and comprehensive article , the business daily Financial Times echoed the work of a commission headed by Nobel laureates Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz for economic indicators do not ignore the value of activities that are socially present, but do not generate cash flow. The article argues that the GDP has the advantage of being a quantitative scale, but the disadvantage of being qualitative. The problem is then: how to measure the qualitative, for example, the wealth of having healthy citizens or to produce less waste? On these issues the heady works commission, although the most likely reach the conclusion that it will take several parameters to give us an accurate idea of ​​whether greater wealth of GDP also means better quality of life for all.

So, do not forget, when a politician in an election in the midst of a crisis to ensure economic growth (GDP improvement), ask who cleans the dust at home. Same contributes more to economic development that spending money on media campaigns.