The Structure of Production

In 2014, the U. S. government adopted a new quarterly statistic called gross output (GO), the most significance advance in national income accounting since gross domestic product (GDP) was developed in the 1940s. The announcement came as a triumph for Mark Skousen, who advocated GO nearly 25 years ago as an essential macroeconomic tool and a better way to measure the economy and the business cycle. Now it has become an official statistic issued quarterly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U. S. Department of Commerce. In this new revised edition of Structure of Production, Skousen shows why GO is a more accurate and comprehensive measure of the economy because it includes business-to-business transactions that move the supply chain along to final use. (GDP measures the value of finished goods and services only, and omits B-to-B activity.) GO is an attempt to measure spending at all stages of production. Using GO, Skousen demonstrates that the supply-side of the business spending is far more important than consumer spending, is more consistent with economic growth theory, and a better measure of the business cycle.

In 2014, the U. S. government adopted a new quarterly statistic called gross output (GO), the most significance advance in national income accounting since gross domestic product (GDP) was developed in the 1940s. The announcement came as a triumph for Mark Skousen, who advocated GO nearly 25 years ago as an essential macroeconomic tool and a better way to measure the economy and the business cycle. Now it has become an official statistic issued quarterly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U. S. Department of Commerce. In this new revised edition of Structure of Production, Skousen shows why GO is a more accurate and comprehensive measure of the economy because it includes business-to-business transactions that move the supply chain along to final use. (GDP measures the value of finished goods and services only, and omits B-to-B activity.) GO is an attempt to measure spending at all stages of production. Using GO, Skousen demonstrates that the supply-side of the business spending is far more important than consumer spending, is more consistent with economic growth theory, and a better measure of the business cycle.

CONTENTSIntroduction to the Paperback Edition xiPreface xxxix1. Introduction: The Case for a New Macroeconomics 1PART ITHE STRUCTURE OF PRODUCTION: A HISTORICAL SURVEY2. The Theory of Production in Classical Economics 133. Hayek and the 1930s: A New Vision of Macroeconomics 434. Time and Production in the Post-Keynesian Era 84PART 2THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK5. The Structure of Production: The Building Blocks 1336. Time and the Aggregate Production Structure 1847. Savings, Technology, and Economic Growth 2158. The Theory of Commodity Money: Economics of a PureGold Standard 2659. Economics of a Fiat Money Standard: A Theory of theBusiness Cycle 282ixPART 3APPLICATIONS10. Implications for Government Economic Policy 33511. Conclusions: The Future of Economic Theory and Research 363References 3 79Index 401About the Author 417