The news regularly reports on the state of “The Economy”. They even have numbers: The US Economy is up 2.3%.
I get that a major factor is the Gross Domestic Product number. Obviously, it does not include the unemployment rate.
So, what exactly are the factors in this calculation?
Yes, they’re reporting GDP. Usually they are reporting an annualized rate for a quarter. (i.e. if there was .6% actual growth last quarter, they’ll report that the US economy is growing at 2.4%).
Unemployment is not factored in at all. GDP is just a measure of how much is being spent. Wikipedia has got a good resource on the methods for calculating GDP.
Good question. What exactly is “the news?”
That depends on what your definition of “is” is.
That depends on your definition of ‘definition’.
(Also, it’s GDP, which is updated every quarter and isn’t ‘set in stone’ for many months, so it’s a pretty hazy number to base a lot of policy off of)