Gross National Product (GNP) is the monetary value of all of a nation’s final output (services and goods) in a specific year. GNP calculation is done by summing up the gross domestic product (GDP) of all the businesses and individual citizens in a country (Wan et al., 2022). The GNP is often used as an indicator of a country’s economic health because it measures how much wealth is being created domestically. However, it is important to note that the GNP does not take into account any money that has been made or lost by people living outside of the country. Furthermore, two key factors affect GNP in the United States: the size of the population and the level of economic activity (Wan et al., 2022). The size of the population affects GNP because a larger population means more people are working and producing goods and services. GNP is affected by the economic activity rate since it dictates the amount of money spent on services and goods; higher spending rates lead to higher levels of GNP.
For example, if an American company produces widgets in China and sells them to consumers in the United States, that transaction will be counted in both the Chinese GDP and American GNP. On the other hand, if an American company exports widgets to Canada, only the Canadian GDP would be included in the calculation. Moreover, the United States, as defined by the World Bank, is a high-income country with a gross national product of $59,532 per capita (Gale, 2020). The United States’ health care expenditure was estimated at 17.8% ($3.4 trillion) of the GDP in 2015, and it is projected to be 19.9% of the GDP in 2025 (Stone, 2017). Several reasons, including the rising prices of medical equipment and treatments and the rising rates of chronic diseases, have contributed to the United States’ sky-high healthcare expenses. The rising expense of healthcare is also attributable to increased wages for medical professionals and the overhead of managing such a sophisticated system. However, there is considerable debate about how much each of these factors contributes to overall spending on health care in the United States.
References
Gale, W. G. (2020). Tackling the federal debt problem fairly. The Journal of Economic Education, 51(3-4), 332-358.
Stone, P. W. (2017). Determining value in the US healthcare system. Nursing Economics, 35(3), 142-145. Web.
Wan, Q., Tang, Z., Pan, J., Xie, M., Wang, S., Yin, H., Li, J., Liu, X., Yang, Y., & Song, C. (2022). Spatiotemporal heterogeneity in associations of national population ageing with socioeconomic and environmental factors at the global scale. Journal of Cleaner Production, 373, 133781.