Real gross domestic product
Real gross domestic product (real GDP for short) is a macroeconomic measure of the value of economic output adjusted for price changes (i.e. inflation or deflation). This adjustment transforms the money-value measure, nominal GDP, into an index for quantity of total output. Although GDP is total output, it is primarily useful because it closely approximates the total spending: the sum of consumer spending, investment made by industry, excess of exports over imports, and government spending. Due to inflation, GDP increases and does not actually reflect the true growth in an economy. That is why the GDP must be divided by the inflation rate (raised to the power of units of time in which the rate is measured) to get the growth of the real GDP. Different organizations use different types of 'Real GDP' measures, for example the United Nations UNCTAD uses 2005 Constant prices and exchange rates while the FRED uses 2009 constant prices and exchange rates, and recently the World Bank switched from 2005 to 2010 constant prices and exchange rates.
System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting
The high level conference "Beyond GDP" in November 2007 at which Commissioner Dimas concluded that "we [The European Commission] will also need to speed up and improve the development of integrated accounting in the social and environmental spheres" increased the interest for SEEA (please consult the official web-site of Beyond GDP at http://www.beyond-gdp.eu/). The idea of Beyond GDP is to increase the use of indicators related to environment and social aspects in relation to indicators such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) "...to address global challenges such as climate change, poverty, resource depletion and health" (Beyond GDP web-site). In 2009 the European Commission issued a communication "GDP and beyond Measuring progress in a changing world" describing the need to complement economic indicators such as the GDP with social and environmental indicators. According to this communication, the European Commission plans to extend the existing data collection further, ready for policy analysis by 2013.