Population and labour inputs

Economic activity is essentially human activity and yet the sequence of accounts does not refer to persons except indirectly. All individuals that make up households (the population) are only identified in so far as they engage in consumption expenditure. Those individuals that are employees feature only as the recipients of compensation with no indication about whether there are a few very well paid employees or many very poorly paid (though in fact there are some of each and many in between). The purpose of this chapter is to show how data for population and labour can be used in conjunction with key entries in the sequence of accounts to show how much the average citizen benefits from economic activity and how much the average worker contributes to output. An indication of the first is given by measuring GDP per capita and of the second by estimating labour productivity. As well as being of interest in themselves, these figures are interesting in comparison with similar data in different time periods and in different countries.

Related Subject(s): Economic and Social Development