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- The concepts like national income and national product are most significant in macroeconomic accounting. As the accounting statement of a firm provides information on the flow of revenues and expenses fully to show the firm's performance, the national income accounts supply similar information for the economy as a whole. They providecomprehensive overview of how the economy is doing. Among the various aspects that shape the economy is the nation's capacity to produce goods and services and keep various factors of production employed. The GNP growth rate, the most important indicator of the nation's economy, shows whether the nation's income is expanding or contracting, and thus, it is the broadest statistical aggregate of our economic output and growth. The estimates of GNP and national income provide the policy makers and business community with the most useful tool for analyzing an economy's economic performance. In simple terms, GNP is the sum of all final goods and services produced during a specified time period, usually a year, with each class of goods and services measured at its market value, i.e. at price usually paid. In addition to GNP, there are some other aggregates of national product such as GDP, NDP, and NNP that measure a nation's production of goods and services. GDP is the value — at current market prices or factor prices — of the total final goods and services produced inside an economy or country during a given time. By contrast, GNP is the value — at current market prices or factor prices — of the total final goods and services produced during a year by the factors owned by an economy or country. The difference between gross and net products is depreciation. In words, depreciation is deducted from gross products to get net products. When measuring GNP, or any other aggregate of national product, only the final value of goods and services is to be considered. In other words, only the value added at each stage of production process is considered while measuring GNP.
- It is important to distinguish between real and nominal values of macroeconomic aggregates. When comparing data at different points in time, economists often use terms such as real wages, real income or real GNP. The 'real' refers to the fact that the data have been adjusted for changes in the level of prices. Thus real GNP in current rupees is estimated by deflating the nominal GNP. This is done using GNP deflator. GNP deflator is a price index constructed to a price index to reveal the cost of purchasing the items included in GNP during the period relative to the cost of purchasing the same items in base year. Price indices are measures of inflation. Apart from GNP or GDP deflator, there are two important price indices — the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Wholesale Price Index (WPI). Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a price index that is used to measure the cost of a fixed basket of consumer goods in which the weight assigned to each good is the proportionate of expenditures on that good by consumers in the base year. The principles of construction of WPI are quite analogous to those behind CPI. WPI considers producer goods and wholesale prices in contrast to CPI. Weights are based on the value of transaction in various items in the base year.