Gross National Product in Australia

       According to Dr. Paul M. Johnson (Source1) gross national product (GNP) is “An estimate of the total money value of all the final goods and services produced in a given one-year period by the factors of production owned by a particular country's residents. “Final" goods and services means goods and services sold or otherwise provided to their final consumers.” Gross national product also includes income made by all the country’s citizens.” Johnson also states that “one can estimate total GNP by summing up estimates of the different kinds of earnings people receive from producing these same final goods and services: total wages and salaries, profits of incorporated and unincorporated businesses, rental incomes, and interest incomes.” Gross National Product (GNI) is closely related to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the economic world. Nicholas Freiling (Source 2) feels “the most significant shortcoming of GNP as a measure of economic growth is its inclusion of government spending. By including government spending it diminishes from GNP’s usefulness as a way to measure economic growth because the government’s expenditures are not beneficial to social welfare.” Freiling also touches that another shortcoming is GDP’s failure to account for productive non-market activities. “A mother raising a child, for example, is an extremely important activity. But it is not something that is paid for or provided on the market.”

     Australia’s Gross National Product is ranked 12th globally. The GNP value of Australia is over 1 billion U.S. dollars and has remained in this range for the past 5 years. On average, Australia’s Gross Domestic Product is around 225262.28 AUD million since 1985. In the year 2012, Australia’s real GDP growth was around 3.6% and has gone down to 2.8% in 2014. As seen in the chart below, Australia’s GDP has been steadily increasing. (Source 3)  

      Figure 1- Australia GDP between the years 2004 and 2014

By: Gabrielle Ramsay and Christie Johnson

Work Cited-

(Source 1) http://www.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/GNP

(Source 2).http://hanseconomics.com/2012/01/29/the-shortcomings-of-gdp-as-a-measure-of-economic-growth/

(Source 3). Knoema.com
(Figure 1) www.statista.com