Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the total value of goods and services produced in a country over a period of time. Most economists consider it to be the broadest indicator of a country's economic health. In the United States too, the GDP has been adopted as a key measure of economic activity since the early 1990s and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) regularly releases detailed GDP figures that are keenly tracked by the markets to gauge the current and future state of the economy. This paper discusses Gross Domestic Product with particular reference to the U.S. economy, describes how it serves as an indicator of the country's economic health and explains the components that make up the GDP.

GDP and GNP

Until the early 1990s, the Gross National Product (GNP) rather than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was used by the U.S. To measure economic activity. The main...
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