What does "GDP" measure?

GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, adds up the total value of all the goods and services a country produces over a set period, usually a quarter or a year. Economists like it because it condenses an enormous, complicated economy into one number that can be tracked over time and compared across countries, making it the standard yardstick for describing whether an economy is growing, stagnant, or shrinking.

A country's total debt is a completely separate figure describing how much a government owes, which can rise or fall independently of how much the country actually produces. The number of people employed is only one input into overall economic output, not a measure of the value of what is actually produced.

Because GDP only counts what happens within a country's borders, a company can produce goods abroad through factories owned by its home country and have that output counted toward the foreign country's GDP instead, which is one of several well-known quirks economists debate about the measure.