Gulnara Nolan

Technological change and the monetary policy effectiveness

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Last week I discussed GDP-B and its potential impact on monetary policy. The main takeaway was that, if GDP-B led to a higher production figure it didn’t necessarily mean that monetary policy needed to be tighter or looser – instead it is changes in prices and inflation expectations that remain key.

However, there is a key way that the technological change embedded in GDP-B could well matter for monetary policy – the way it influences how expenditures take place and how they are shifted through time.

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Gulnara Nolan

Does a new GDP measure change optimal monetary policy?

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At the 61st Annual Meeting of the National Association for Business Economics, The Fed’s chair Jerome Powell gave an insightful speech. The key takeaway from the speech was that in an evolving economy, monetary policy is very data driven.

Powell touched on three aspects of evolving economy: the consequences of an oil price spike, the measurement of output and productivity, and the role of tightness in the labour market.

In this post I will talk about the measurement of output and productivity aspect of the speech and some elements of that which will matter for monetary policy.

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Gulnara Nolan

A New GDP measure (GDP-B) in a digital economy

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Although GDP is a good measure of what it is supposed to measure, there are always questions about whether it is the right measure when asking a given policy question. This was the driving motivation behind the Living Standard’s Framework and the development of a suite of measures to inform our views on wellbeing, as I’ve previously written (with Anita King and Nairn MacGibbon).

The focus of this post is on digitization. In an era of digitization, economists have become more and more concerned about whether the conventional way of calculating GDP is appropriate for asking questions about changes in consumer welfare (surplus) through time.

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