Income up as GDP falls

Norway exemplifies a trend leading some to question whether GDP measures wellbeing M. Michael Brady Asker, Norway Conventional economic wisdom holds that the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country is the best gauge of the health of its economy. Likewise, spread over the population of a country, per-capita GDP is an index of the economic wellbeing of its residents. That bit of wisdom recently has been questioned, not least by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), devoted to stimulating economic progress and world trade among its 34 member countries. By the myriad statistics that it compiles and crunches, the OECD has become the benchmark source of numbers for comparing eco