Single correct option
Summarise the passage in one sentence:
The idea that a single number can capture a country's economic well-being has always been contested, but GDP's dominance persisted for decades because it was simple to compute and easy to compare across countries. Recent efforts to supplement or replace it — with measures of wellbeing, sustainability, or inequality-adjusted income — have gained traction not because GDP became more flawed, but because policymakers increasingly need to justify trade-offs, such as between growth and environmental damage, that a single aggregate number cannot represent.
The idea that a single number can capture a country's economic well-being has always been contested, but GDP's dominance persisted for decades because it was simple to compute and easy to compare across countries. Recent efforts to supplement or replace it — with measures of wellbeing, sustainability, or inequality-adjusted income — have gained traction not because GDP became more flawed, but because policymakers increasingly need to justify trade-offs, such as between growth and environmental damage, that a single aggregate number cannot represent.
- A. GDP has recently been proven mathematically incorrect, forcing economists to abandon it entirely in favour of wellbeing indices.
- B. GDP's long dominance owed more to its simplicity than to its accuracy, and newer alternative measures are gaining ground mainly because policymakers now need to represent trade-offs that GDP cannot.
- C. Inequality-adjusted income is now universally accepted as the best replacement for GDP in all policy contexts.
- D. Economists have always agreed that GDP is the single best measure of a country's economic well-being.
Show answer and solution
Answer: (B) GDP's long dominance owed more to its simplicity than to its accuracy, and newer alternative measures are gaining ground mainly because policymakers now need to represent trade-offs that GDP cannot.
The passage's core claim is that GDP persisted due to simplicity, not accuracy, and that alternatives are now gaining ground because of the need to represent trade-offs — this is precisely option B. Option A overstates 'abandonment'; C and D contradict the passage's framing of ongoing contestation, not universal agreement.
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