Apart from this curious view of government, the national accounts expose a number of other accounting oddities. GDP, for instance, does not clearly distinguish a cost from an investment in future capacity, such as R&D; services valuable to the economy such as ‘care’ may be exchanged without any payment, making them invisible to GDP calculators; likewise, illegal black-market activities may constitute a large part of an economy. A resource that is destroyed by pollution may not be counted as a subtraction from GDP–but when pollution is cleaned up by marketed services, GDP increases. And then
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