All countries will eventually need to rebuild their growth models around digital technologies and the human capital that supports their deployment and expansion.
Michael SpenceRead
One way to measure the size of a company, industry, or economy is to determine its output. But a better way is to determine its added value - namely, the difference between the value of its outputs, that is, the goods and services it produces, and the costs of its inputs, such as the raw materials and energy it consumes.
Interpretation
The value of a company is better measured by its added value than by its total output.
This quote emphasizes that assessing a company's worth should go beyond merely evaluating the volume of goods and services produced. Instead, the focus should be on the added value, which is the difference between the revenue generated from outputs and the costs incurred from inputs, thus highlighting the importance of efficiency and innovation in creating value within an economy.
In practice
A business presentation on how to improve productivity by focusing on added value.
All countries will eventually need to rebuild their growth models around digital technologies and the human capital that supports their deployment and expansion.
Developing economies may not have much control over the headwinds that they face today, but that does not mean that they are powerless. Much can be done not just to sustain moderate growth but also to secure a more prosperous and resilient future.
Reforms aimed at increasing an economy's flexibility are always hard - and even more so at a time of weak growth - because they require eliminating protections for vested interests in the short term for the sake of greater long-term prosperity.
The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.
Instead of abandoning competition and giving banks protected monopolies once again, the public would be better served by making it easier to close banks when they get into trouble. Instead of making banking boring, let us make it a normal industry, susceptible to destruction in the face of creativity.
When a business or an individual spends more than it makes, it goes bankrupt. When government does it, it sends you the bill. And when government does it for 40 years, the bill comes in two ways: higher taxes and inflation. Make no mistake about it, inflation is a tax and not by accident.
It's not that other countries steal jobs from you guys. It's your strategy. Distribute the money and things in a proper way.
Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.
The perennial conviction that those who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with a more comfortable present and a stronger future for their children faces assault from just about every direction. That great enemy of democratic capitalism, economic inequality, is real and growing.
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