Finance Guide

Gross national income (GNI) is a measure of a country’s wealth. Many such measures exist, all varying slightly in how they are calculated. Gross Domestic Product is the most widely cited measured of national wealth. Gross National Income is an alternative measure which is very similar to Gross Domestic Product. Gross National Income is calculated in the same way as gross domestic product with the twist that income receive or given out to other countries is added in.

For example, if citizens of one country have invested heavily abroad in, say, shares, and those shares produced a regular dividend income which is repatriated each year to the country of the share owners, this income would show up in the figurers for gross national income.

Gross National Product is a synonym of Gross National Income. Formerly, Gross National Income was the most popular measure of a country’s wealth. As the levels of global trade increased, however, and countries became more economically interdependent, and large multi-national corporations evolved with activities in many countries, eventually Gross Domestic Product came to be the preferred measure of wealth for most economic purposes.

For most countries Gross Domestic Product and Gross National Income are almost identical. In a few rare instances, though, there may be a significant difference.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a measure of the total economic value of everything produced in a certain area (usually a country) in one year. The wealth of a country is usually measured as GDP per capita. This figure is arrived at by taking the total gross domestic product and dividing it by the number of people in the economy.

There are different ways of measuring gross domestic product. One way is to count up all the money spent by individuals, companies and governments on different things in one year and add it together. Another is to count up all the income received by individuals, companies and governments in one year and add that together. Yet another approach is to measure the value of the output of everything produced by individuals, governments and corporations within the area within one year and add that up. In theory, all three of these approaches, which are known as the expenditure approach, the income approach and the output approach, all ought to yield the same value for gross domestic product. In practice, there are usually slight differences between the value yielded by each.

In modern economies, the rate of growth (or of contraction in cases of recession) of GDP is usually estimated on a quarterly basis.

The term economy is usually used to describe the sum total of transactions – the buying or selling of goods or services – within a defined geographic area, usually a country, over a period of time. Economists have devised a number of concepts for measuring the size of an economy. Among these are the Gross Domestic Product and the Gross National Product.

It is generally considered desirable that the size of an economy should expand over time since this means that the people within the country become wealthier. Some ecologically-minded people dissent from this view, however, arguing that the high levels of personal consumption prevalent in the Western world are unsustainable because they represent too much of a drain on the earth’s resources.

In modern times, in the developed world, economies have experienced an almost constant expansion, though growth rates among them have differed. Exceptions to this, when economies in fact contracted, have generally been brief and are known as recessions or, in extreme cases, depressions.

Outside of the developed Western world, the picture has been more varied and exhibits more extremes. Cases exist, on the one hand, of economies shrinking over time and, on the other, of experiencing rapid expansion, enjoying much higher rates of economic growth than are common in the West.