第7讲国民收入核算论.pptVIP

* Mostly, the term “consumption” refers to what students probably already think of as total consumer spending. The note about the treatment of owner-occupied housing is an exception, and some of the test bank questions are designed to see if students remember this exception. (For more on this issue, see the notes accompanying the following slide.) * More on the treatment of owner-occupied housing: In the national income and product accounts, a house is considered a piece of capital that is used to produce a flow of services – housing services. When a consumer (as a tenant) rents a house or apartment, the consumer is buying housing services. These services are considered consumption, so the price paid for these services – rent – is counted in the “consumption” component of GDP . When someone buys a new house to live in, she is both a producer and a consumer. As a producer, she has made an investment (the purchase of the house) that will produce a service. She is also the consumer of this service, which is valued at the market rental rate for that type of house. So, the accounting conventions treat this situation as if the person is her own landlord and rents the house to/from herself. When students begin to understand this, they may wonder why certain other goods (like cars) that produce a flow of consumer services are not also treated this way. There really is no good answer. It’s just a convention of the national income and product accounts. * You might tell your students that transfer payments, like Social Security checks, are excluded from G to avoid double-counting: retired persons spend part or all of their Social Security benefits on food, rent, prescriptions, and so forth, all of which count in consumption. If we also counted the Social Security check as part of G, then the same money would be counted twice, which would make GDP look bigger than it really is. * The “net” in “net exports” refers to the fact that we are subtracting i