An Alternative Method How to Measure Impact of the Intensive and Extensive Factors on the GDP Change and Its Application on the Us and China GDP Development

The article presents an alternative method to growth accounting. It makes it possible to express the effect of change in the quantity of inputs as well as the effect of the productivity of inputs (i.e. technological changes) on the change of GDP for all possible typologies of input/output changes. Unlike the growth accounting, this method is universal and also accurate; it may be applied not only to small growth rates. Dynamic parameters of intensity and extensity could be delivered as the output of the method. The first one captures the effect of change in the summary productivity of factors, while the latter captures changes in the input quantity. The dynamic parameters were calculated for the development of GDP in the United States and China for a period of fifty years (1960–2011). In case of the United States, it was also calculated how the development of labor and the development of capital contribute to the change in inputs. The calculated values verify that the method can reliably capture significant changes that took place in the given countries in individual years. The growth rate of the summary productivity of factors calculated on the basis of our method only differs slightly from the growth rate of the summary productivity of factors calculated on the basis of growth accounting. For all the aforementioned reasons, the method appears to be a suitable instrument for analyzing the GDP development.