Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other statistics based on national income accounting are ubiquitous but rarely understood today. GDP has been criticized for many reasons, including not reflecting well-being, leaving out the costs of environmental pollution, and not counting unpaid work, but on purely economic terms it has been mostly accepted as an indicator of economic performance. In recent decades, however, GDP has diverged dramatically from economic trends such as employment and median income. This book argues that GDP is flawed even as a narrow economic indicator, and traces the problem to the way financial services are measured. The first part of the book is a political history of the practice of national accounting from its beginning in the mid-17th century to present day, and explores how such income estimates were constructed for political reasons. The Financialization of GDP presents the practice of estimating national income as a historically and political contingent craft - driven by power and not only theory - culminating in the rise of the financial sector and the concomitant inclusion of financial services in GDP in 1993.. The second part of the book focuses on the treatment of financial services in national accounting and develops an adjusted measure of output (Final Domestic Product or FDP) – which treats financial revenues as intermediate inputs (or costs) to the economy as a whole. The final part of the book explores the empirical and policy implications of treating finance as an overall cost to the economy. This volume shows that the Great Moderation of volatility was a statistical artefact; Okun’s Law (relating changes in output and unemployment) never died, and even provides early signs for the Great Recession which analysts using standard GDP did not see. This book is of great interest to those who study political economy and macroeconomics.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other statistics based on national income accounting are ubiquitous but rarely understood today. GDP has been criticized for many reasons, including not reflecting well-being, leaving out the costs of environmental pollution, and not counting unpaid work, but on purely economic terms it has been mostly accepted as an indicator of economic performance. In recent decades, however, GDP has diverged dramatically from economic trends such as employment and median income. This book argues that GDP is flawed even as a narrow economic indicator, and traces the problem to the way financial services are measured. The first part of the book is a political history of the practice of national accounting from its beginning in the mid-17th century to present day, and explores how such income estimates were constructed for political reasons. The Financialization of GDP presents the practice of estimating national income as a historically and political contingent craft - driven by power and not only theory - culminating in the rise of the financial sector and the concomitant inclusion of financial services in GDP in 1993.. The second part of the book focuses on the treatment of financial services in national accounting and develops an adjusted measure of output (Final Domestic Product or FDP) – which treats financial revenues as intermediate inputs (or costs) to the economy as a whole. The final part of the book explores the empirical and policy implications of treating finance as an overall cost to the economy. This volume shows that the Great Moderation of volatility was a statistical artefact; Okun’s Law (relating changes in output and unemployment) never died, and even provides early signs for the Great Recession which analysts using standard GDP did not see. This book is of great interest to those who study political economy and macroeconomics.

Profound transformations have taken place both in the US and the global economy, most especially in the realm of finance. This title brings together a comprehensive analysis of financialization in the US economy that encompasses historical, theoretical, and empirical sides of the issues.

In the history of capitalism, there is a consensus in the literature that the 1980swas a turning point. According to many heterodox social scientists, the criticaldevelopment that provides this turning point is that capitalism has enteredthe financialization process. This period that started after 1980 is called‘Financialized capitalism.’ This period’s most important characteristic featureis that the capital accumulation mechanism shifted gravity from the industrialsector to the financial field. In the heterodox political economy, much literatureon financialization has emerged over the past fifteen years. However, it stilldoes not have a single definition agreed upon. Unfortunately, a compositefinancialization index measuring the level of multi-dimensional financializationfor different countries has not yet been found in the literature. In this book,first of all, the financialization literature of Neo-Marxist and Post-Keynesianpolitical economy approaches has been scanned, and four dimensions offinancialization have been determined. These are the financialization of thenational economy, the financial sector, non-financial firms, and households. Inthis context, to measure financialization, a panel data set covering 22 variablesthat can represent the four dimensions of financialization, OECD countries,and the period between 1995-2018 was created. The OECD averages of eachvariable were found through this data set, and their long-term developmentswere analyzed. In addition, the behavior of each variable before, during, andafter the 2008 Global Crisis caused by financialization was also evaluated.As a result of the analyzes made, it has been seen that these variables aresuitable for the creation of a composite financialization index. Our greatestwish is that this book will be helpful to students in fields such as economics,political science, international relations, sociology, and researchers who aimto measure financialization.

The term financialization is a term that has become popular to describe developments within the global economy, and particularly within developed industrialized economies, over the past thirty years. The book is divided into four sections, which together give a comprehensive treatment of the economics and political economy of financialization.

How important is financial development for economic development? A costly state verification model of financial intermediation is presented to address this question. The model is calibrated to match facts about the U.S. economy, such as intermediation spreads and the firm-size distribution for the years 1974 and 2004. It is then used to study the international data, using cross-country interest-rate spreads and per-capita GDP. The analysis suggests that a country like Uganda could increase its output by 140 to 180 percent if it could adopt the world's best practice in the financial sector. Still, this amounts to only 34 to 40 percent of the gap between Uganda's potential and actual output. Charts and tables.