GDP, GDI, and GDO: an evaluation of output measures for productivity analysis

Official U.S. nonfarm business labor productivity growth estimates are based on the product-side output measure of gross domestic product (GDP). Labor productivity can also be estimated based on the income-side output measure of gross domestic income (GDI) and on the average of GDP and GDI, also known as gross domestic output (GDO). This article compares the relative attributes of these three output measures with respect to their usage for labor productivity analysis and provides a methodology for how alternative measures of labor productivity can be computed by using GDI and GDO. In 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) began publishing a series that was an average of gross domestic product (GDP) and gross domestic income (GDI). This series, which some researchers refer to as gross domestic output (GDO), had been cited in research during the decade prior to 2015 as having exhibited the beneficial quality of lower revisions than either GDP or GDI.