A few weeks after the Russia-Ukraine war began, Belgian economist Paul De Grauwe penned an article for the website of the London School of Economics with the title ‘Russia cannot win the war’. No military specialist, De Grauwe based his conclusion on some simple math: Russia’s GDP was roughly equivalent to the combined output of Belgium and the Netherlands. Therefore, he claimed, Russia is an “economic dwarf in Europe.” Its military operation was thus doomed.
The GDP myth: What it really shows, and what it doesn’tThe most-often cited metric of economic success more often than not simply tells us what we want to hear – or what the West wants us to hear.
BY Henry Johnston