개방경제의 실질소득지표에 대한 연구

초록

Most countries use the growth of real GDP to measure the performance of economic growth. This paper emphasizes that the growth of real income better represents the welfare effect of economic growth in the long-term perspective. This assertion is based on the following grounds: (1) consumption is the ultimate goal of economic activities, which raises households' utility. (2) consumption is more closely related to real income than to the amount of production. With this view point, it is important to develop measures that can capture the flow of real income in the economy more accurately. Classical approaches for the closed economy focus on changes in a relative price between consumption and investment while approaches for the open economy pay attention to changes in the terms of trade. The paper proposes a new measure of real income that takes into account the effect on real income of changes in various sorts of relative prices, including the terms of trade. It is constructed by dividing nominal GDP by consumption deflator. This measure of real income turns out to have a desirable property that it grows at the same rate with consumption in the long run.

키워드