Reference Terms
from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gross domestic product
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a year, or other given period of time. GDP per capita is often considered an indicator of a country's standard of living.
GDP per capita is not a measure of personal income. Under economic theory, GDP per capita exactly equals the gross domestic income (GDI) per capita.
GDP is related to national accounts, a subject in macroeconomics. GDP is not to be confused with gross national product (GNP) which allocates production based on ownership.
GDP can be determined in three ways, all of which should, in principle, give the same result. They are the production (or output) approach, the income approach, or the expenditure approach.
The most direct of the three is the production approach, which sums the outputs of every class of enterprise to arrive at the total. The expenditure approach works on the principle that all of the product must be bought by somebody, therefore the value of the total product must be equal to people's total expenditures in buying things. The income approach works on the principle that the incomes of the productive factors ("producers," colloquially) must be equal to the value of their product, and determines GDP by finding the sum of all producers' incomes.
Related Stories
1
2
Science & Society News
January 18, 2026
Jan. 16, 2026 Humans pay enormous attention to lips during conversation, and robots have struggled badly to keep up. A new robot developed at Columbia Engineering learned realistic lip movements by watching its own reflection and studying human videos online. ...
Jan. 9, 2026 A new study finds that TikTok videos about gout frequently spread confusing or inaccurate advice. Most clips focus on diet changes and supplements, while barely mentioning the long-term treatments doctors say are essential for controlling the ...
Jan. 5, 2026 Nearly all women in STEM graduate programs report feeling like impostors, despite strong evidence of success. This mindset leads many to dismiss their achievements as luck and fear being “found out.” Research links impostorism to worse mental ...
Jan. 4, 2026 Researchers compared a traditional Chinese medicine, Yueju Pill, with a standard antidepressant and found both reduced depression symptoms. However, only Yueju Pill increased a brain-supporting protein associated with mood improvement. Brain imaging ...
Jan. 4, 2026 UK experts are warning that access to new weight-loss drugs could depend more on wealth than medical need. Strict NHS criteria mean only a limited number of patients will receive Mounjaro, while many others must pay privately. Researchers say this ...
Jan. 1, 2026 Moss may look insignificant, but it can carry a hidden forensic fingerprint. Because different moss species thrive in very specific micro-environments, tiny fragments can reveal exactly where a person has been. Researchers reviewing 150 years of ...
Dec. 31, 2025 A major update to how obesity is defined could push U.S. obesity rates to nearly 70%, according to a large new study. The change comes from adding waist and body fat measurements to BMI, capturing people who were previously considered healthy. Many ...
Dec. 30, 2025 Scientists have discovered a clever way to turn carrot processing leftovers into a nutritious and surprisingly appealing protein. By growing edible fungi on carrot side streams, researchers produced fungal mycelium that can replace traditional ...
Dec. 27, 2025 Stanford scientists have uncovered how mRNA COVID-19 vaccines can very rarely trigger heart inflammation in young men — and how that risk might be reduced. They found that the vaccines can spark a ...
Dec. 24, 2025 What we put on our plates may matter more for the climate than we realize. Researchers found that most people, especially in wealthy countries, are exceeding a “food emissions budget” needed to keep global warming below 2°C. Beef alone accounts ...
Dec. 20, 2025 Long before opioids flooded communities, something else was quietly changing—and it may have helped set the stage for today’s crisis. A new study finds that as church attendance dropped among middle-aged, less educated white Americans, deaths ...
Dec. 15, 2025 Around 1,000 years ago, a major climate shift reshaped rainfall across the South Pacific, making western islands like Samoa and Tonga drier while eastern islands such as Tahiti became increasingly ...
Latest Headlines
updated 12:56 pm ET
Jan. 12, 2026 Waiting to eat when your food arrives first feels polite—but it may be mostly for your own peace of mind. Researchers found people feel far more uncomfortable breaking the “wait until everyone is ...
Jan. 6, 2026 Dogs began diversifying thousands of years earlier than previously believed, with clear differences in size and shape appearing over 11,000 years ago. A massive global analysis of ancient skulls ...
Jan. 4, 2026 New research shows Karnak Temple was built on a rare island of high ground formed as Nile river channels shifted thousands of years ago. Before that, the area was too flooded for settlement, making ...
Dec. 31, 2025 A philosopher at the University of Cambridge says there’s no reliable way to know whether AI is conscious—and that may remain true for the foreseeable future. According to Dr. Tom McClelland, ...
Dec. 29, 2025 Scientists have uncovered ancient wolf remains on a small Baltic island where wolves could only have been brought by humans. These animals weren’t dogs, but true wolves that ate the same marine ...
Dec. 24, 2025 The familiar fight between “mind as software” and “mind as biology” may be a false choice. This work proposes biological computationalism: the idea that brains compute, but not in the ...
Dec. 24, 2025 AI writing tools are supercharging scientific productivity, with researchers posting up to 50% more papers after adopting them. The biggest beneficiaries are scientists who don’t speak English as a ...
Dec. 23, 2025 Your eyes may reveal when your brain is working overtime. Researchers found that people blink less when trying to understand speech in noisy environments, especially during the most important ...
Dec. 21, 2025 Sediments from a Roman latrine at Vindolanda show soldiers were infected with multiple intestinal parasites, including roundworm, whipworm, and Giardia — the first time Giardia has been identified ...
Dec. 18, 2025 Traces of opium found inside an ancient alabaster vase suggest drug use was common in ancient Egypt, not rare or accidental. The discovery raises the possibility that King Tut’s famous jars once ...