Documents Coyle, Diane 4 results

"Digital platforms are proliferating in many countries and many sectors of the economy. Platforms create immense value, for their customers and also for their suppliers. Yet all too often they are seen only through the lens of the ‘disruption' of incumbents, resulting in a narrow debate about whether platforms should be more heavily regulated. Yet the right questions are: what policy framework will ensure the immense benefits are encouraged and widely shared; what will help create new platforms, and sustain healthy competition and innovation; and how can unwelcome aspects of platform behaviour be avoided? This paper gives a broad overview of theory and evidence to date on digital platforms and aims to set out the issues that remain to be addressed by researchers, policymakers, and the platform businesses themselves. The distinctive economic characteristics of platforms, their global scope and their rapid evolution make for a rapidly-changing landscape in which traditional policy tools and business strategies do not apply, and there are many questions to be answered."

"Why did the size of the U.S. economy increase by 3 percent on one day in mid-2013--or Ghana's balloon by 60 percent overnight in 2010? Why did the U.K. financial industry show its fastest expansion ever at the end of 2008--just as the world's financial system went into meltdown? And why was Greece's chief statistician charged with treason in 2013 for apparently doing nothing more than trying to accurately report the size of his country's economy? The answers to all these questions lie in the way we define and measure national economies around the world: Gross Domestic Product. This entertaining and informative book tells the story of GDP, making sense of a statistic that appears constantly in the news, business, and politics, and that seems to rule our lives--but that hardly anyone actually understands.
Diane Coyle traces the history of this artificial, abstract, complex, but exceedingly important statistic from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors through its invention in the 1940s and its postwar golden age, and then through the Great Crash up to today. The reader learns why this standard measure of the size of a country's economy was invented, how it has changed over the decades, and what its strengths and weaknesses are. The book explains why even small changes in GDP can decide elections, influence major political decisions, and determine whether countries can keep borrowing or be thrown into recession. The book ends by making the case that GDP was a good measure for the twentieth century but is increasingly inappropriate for a twenty-first-century economy driven by innovation, services, and intangible goods."