Last month the ONS released the Supply and Use Tables for 2014. You can find them here. They are interesting because they provide a measure of intermediate consumption, which many Austrian economists - who care about the entire "structure of production" - believe is an important missing ingredient of typical national accounts. Indeed it's somewhat odd that Gross Domestic Product strips this economic activity out, making it more of a Net concept. As Sean Corrigan puts it, we want the Hayekian horse (of production) in front of the Keynesian cart (of consumption).

Mark Skousen has advocated a measure that he refers to as "Gross Domestic Expenditure", which incorporates all of the production side of the economy. A close substitute for this is "Gross Output", which, as I've previously mentioned, is now published by the BEA (Skousen adjusts Gross Output by adding Gross sales at a retail and wholesale level, to incorporate even more business spending).

I've made previous efforts to measure Gross Output in the UK, using the Supply and Use Tables. This time, I'ive modified the method. I think the simplest way to approach it is to simply combine NGDP with intermediate consumption. Doing so provides the following side-by-side comparison:

Similar to US estimates, we see that Gross Output is around (in fact just under) twice as large as nominal GDP. The interesting comparison is the growth rates, and Gross Output is more volatile than NGDP:

In 2006 it was growing at 7.88% which indicated an even larger boom that was being shown in NGDP data (which grew by 5.52%). It then contracted by -2.31% in 2009 before picking up again. As with NGDP the post crisis growth rate seems enduringly lower. My main interest was the 2014 figure, and we can see that whilst Gross Output grew faster than NGDP in 2013, this was reversed in 2014. Whilst NGDP delivered a robust 4.77%, Gross Output only grew by 3.49%.

The problem with offering an alternative to GDP is there's a burden to provide a better one, or a more theoretically robust one. I wouldn't claim that I've achieved that, but I think it's worthy of enquiry. And if the recent debate between Vincent Geloso and Scott Sumner (and Marcus Nunes and Vincent again) is anything to go by, maybe there's increasing interest in getting this right.