GDP, may be is, one of the most talked about parameter to assess the financial stability of a country.
One issue with GDP is that, it underestimates the value of free goods and services !
Consider free programming languages (open source) like Python and JavaScript, these contribute to more than 70% of job market.
These can be used by any company to develop products or provide various services either for free or for a price.
If a company hires someone to make changes to open-source libraries, then he/she would be paid and that contributes to GDP but if that person decides to contribute to open-source on his own, then that would miss GDP, even though both creates the same value !
A research led by Carol Robbins of the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, attempt to quantify a share of the value being created by these open-source languages.
They found that cost to develop the code for such open-source languages would be over USD 3 Billion !!
With values like these missing from GDP, it becomes very difficult to get an actual economic growth estimate.
What are your thoughts on this parameter missing from GDP ?
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Till next time !
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