What happens to GDP and other economic data when a country is in civil war? Since the civil war in Syria began in 2011, measuring the country's wealth has become most challenging. The two key factors in measuring a country's wealth are population and GDP. Since the civil war began, the population has been significantly reduced. What was measured in 2010, at 20.7 million people, was reduced by 4.8 million fleeing the country. Approximately 7 million more fled their homes as domestic refugees. By 2014, the population is anywhere between 16 million and 18.8 million. Click HERE to read a good illustration of how measuring wealth of the war-torn Syria has become difficult for world trade institutions.
https://www.gfmag.com/topics/blogs/measuring-gdp-civil-war
I guess this kind of makes sense. How do you take a census? How you collect taxes? How do you offer people a place of land to purchase? It is a difficult concept to get information on items like this when you have a war going on. I was listening to a book the other day and the artificial intelligence was kind of forgetful and forgot about the concept of sending people to do battle in space without a space ship. It is a first world problem that the AI missed and those of us that are not affected by the conflict can't put into our minds
ReplyDeleteImportant here is an understanding of what GDP actually means as a metric.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21697845-gross-domestic-product-gdp-increasingly-poor-measure-prosperity-it-not-even