Quality Adjustment for Goods in GDP: The Mobile Phone Example
The difficulty of adjusting for quality is evident in goods like mobile phones, which improve rapidly over time. For national accounting purposes, simply tracking the number of phones sold is misleading. It is essential to assess and account for enhancements in features, processing power, and other quality aspects to accurately measure real economic output.
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Introduction to Macroeconomics Course
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Learn After
An economy produces only one product: a smartphone. In Year 1, it sells 1 million units for $500 each. In Year 2, it sells 1 million units for $520 each. The smartphones produced in Year 2 are substantially more powerful and have more features than the ones from Year 1. If a statistician calculates economic growth by looking only at the total revenue change and does not adjust for the quality improvements, what will be the most likely outcome for the economic data?
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An economist observes that the average selling price of a new mobile phone was $600 in both Year 1 and Year 2. Based on this information alone, the economist concludes that the mobile phone sector made no contribution to the change in the nation's real economic output between the two years. This conclusion is correct.