All countries will eventually need to rebuild their growth models around digital technologies and the human capital that supports their deployment and expansion.
Michael SpenceRead
One way to measure the size of a company, industry, or economy is to determine its output. But a better way is to determine its added value - namely, the difference between the value of its outputs, that is, the goods and services it produces, and the costs of its inputs, such as the raw materials and energy it consumes.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The value of a company is better measured by its added value than by its total output.
This quote emphasizes that assessing a company's worth should go beyond merely evaluating the volume of goods and services produced. Instead, the focus should be on the added value, which is the difference between the revenue generated from outputs and the costs incurred from inputs, thus highlighting the importance of efficiency and innovation in creating value within an economy.
Themes
ValueOutputEconomyAdded ValueInput
In practice
Example use cases
A business presentation on how to improve productivity by focusing on added value.
More from Michael Spence
All quotes →Developing economies may not have much control over the headwinds that they face today, but that does not mean that they are powerless. Much can be done not just to sustain moderate growth but also to secure a more prosperous and resilient future.
Michael SpenceRead
Reforms aimed at increasing an economy's flexibility are always hard - and even more so at a time of weak growth - because they require eliminating protections for vested interests in the short term for the sake of greater long-term prosperity.
Michael SpenceRead
Similar quotes
Close the weak banks and impose serious capital requirements on the strong ones...You see, it may sound hard-hearted, but you cannot keep unsound financial institutions operating simply because they provide jobs.
Paul KrugmanRead
Fair treatment in the work force is no longer exclusively a labor issue, nor is it a women's issue - it is a fundamental economic issue.
Madeleine M. KuninRead
The gap between rich and poor is widening dramatically. There's a hangar at the Cairo airport for private jets, billionaires are on the Forbes list, and Egypt's annual per-capita income is two thousand dollars. How can you sustain that?
Mohamed ElbaradeiRead
I don't know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we've been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about.
Alan GreenspanRead
Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government, and at the same time become ever more impotent. The simplest things, which only fifty years ago one could do without difficulty, cannot get done any more. The richer a society, the more impossible it become to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.
E. F. SchumacherRead
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!
John Maynard KeynesRead