Many series in the UK Data Service international macro data collection are directly about the economy or are about costs, expenditures, economic welfare, work, living standards, benefits etc...
Whilst ultimately the things measured by the series are about matters important to people, will we get enough to eat, will we get a job, can our illness be cured, can we enjoy a new TV set, is our house safe from flooding etc. the very diversity of these matters seems to make them incomparable.
To make comparisons there has to be a common standard, and money can be used as this. It can be thought of as a common accounting device.
Country A has less poverty than country B because there are fewer people in country A earning less than a dollar a day than in country B. This might be a valid statement but it does depend on the money criterion 'dollar a day'.
This economic policy is better than that because it has lead to a faster growth rate in national output - measured in money terms.
Not all measures of benefit or cost to human beings are measured in money terms. For exmaple, emissions of carbon dioxide are thought to damage the ecosphere and cause global warming. We can measure such a cost in terms of physical measures (e.g. tons) of carbon released into the atmosphere.
Aspects of human welfare might be well measured by the amount of education the young receive, or average life span.
However at the moment even specific non-money measures are difficult to compare as measurement definitions and methodologies are different between countries and organisations. Anyway all these particular measures don't 'add up' to a single comparable figure. So money measures remain crucially important.
But there are problems: an obvious difficulty in making cross national comparisons using money is that different countries often have different currencies so money is not a simple common unit of account between countries. This will be looked at in later sections.
There are also deeper problems about the use of money as a standard of comparison that we shall look at briefly in the next section.
