Take a 10-minute guided tour of FRED, the St. Louis Fed's free economic data website. Simple step-by-step activities equip users to find and graph economic data, mastering FRED's look and feel. The guide also shows how to customize, save, and share a FRED graph.

This online activity shows how to use FRED, the Federal Reserve's free online economic data website, to analyze changes in real gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP makeup over time. Following simple instructions, you will locate spending data for the individual components of real GDP, and then combine them into a highly informative area graph. You will also use FRED's ability to stack data and see how trade—imports and exports—contributes to GDP. The resulting customized graph will let you see how economic output varies from year to year.

In this lesson, students learn the definition of gross domestic product (GDP) and the four expenditure categories of GDP. Then, they participate in a readers’ theater about castaways on an island who learn about GDP. Students record examples of items produced on the island that are examples of consumer, government, and investment spending. They recognize that, without trade, there is no net export category for the island.

In a closed economy, goods and services are exchanged in product markets and factors of production are exchanged in factor markets. In this video, we explore how to model this in a straightforward way using the circular flow model. Created by Sal Khan.

When using the expenditures approach to calculating GDP the components are consumption, investment, government spending, exports, and imports. In this video, we explore these components in more detail. Created by Sal Khan.

Our standard of living depends on the pace of economic growth. That pace can be enhanced through increased productivity brought about by investment in physical and human capital and advances in technology. In this course, students will learn about these tools to increase productivity and advance our standard of living.

Thinking about how different types of expenditures would be accounted for in GDP. Created by Sal Khan.

In this video, we explore how purchases of different things affect GDP, or why they wouldn't!

How is the total value of all the goods and services produced in a country's economy measured? Gross domestic product (GDP) is one common and fairly comprehensive measure. The May 2013 issue explains GDP components and how GDP is calculated. It also describes what GDP does—and does not—measure.

GDP and Pizza: Economics for Life is designed to help students in civics, economics and other social studies classes grasp challenging economic content – and to explain why these topics are important for citizens to understand.

History holds many economic lessons. The Great Depression, in particular, is an event that provides the opportunity to teach and learn a great deal about economics-whether you're studying the economic reasons that the Depression took place, the factors that helped it come to an end or the impact on Americans who lived through it. This curriculum is designed to provide teachers with economic lessons that they can share with their students to help them understand this significant experience in U.S. history.

In this video (8 minutes long) students will learn about the factors that make up the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and what impact and significance the GDP has on our economy and economies around the world. This video will aid in the mastery of EPF. 5(a).

GDP data are among the most important economic data available for measuring economic growth, but measuring the output of a large, dynamic economy is a complex task. In this podcast, hear what GDP measures, how it is calculated, how it is useful in determining whether and how quickly the economy is growing, and how GDP can be used as indicator of standard of living.

In this lesson, students participate in two rounds of a role play to help them understand the role of banks in facilitating economic growth through loans. Round 1 is conducted without a bank. After the first round, students read excerpts from Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 report to Congress in which he proposes a national bank because the United States had few banks at the time. Students then conduct Round 2 of the role play with a bank. After the round, students read excerpts from and summaries of the statute creating a national bank, Thomas Jefferson’s opposition, and Hamilton’s rebuttal.

GDP is a useful measure of the health of the economy, and it’s among the most important and widely reported economic data. However, the current “textbook treatment” of how international trade is measured as part of GDP can lead people to misunderstand the role trade plays in the economy. The September 2018 issue of Page One Economics intends to correct misconceptions and provide clear instruction on how imports affect GDP.

In this video we explore an alternative method of calculating GDP: the income approach. The intuition behind the income approach is pretty straightforward because every time you spend money, that spending is someone else's income. Learn more about the income approach and its categories: wages, interest, rent, and profit. Created by Sal Khan.

In this course, the student will build on and apply what you learned in the introductory macroeconomics course. The student will use the concepts of output, unemployment, inflation, consumption, and investment to study the dynamics of an economy at a more advanced level. As the course progresses, the student will gain a better appreciation for how policy shifts and changes in one sector impact the rest of the macroeconomy (whether the impacts are intended or unintended). The student will also examine the causes of inflation and depression, and discuss various approaches to responding to them. By the end of this course, the student should be able to think critically about the economy and develop your own unique perspective on various issues. Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to: Explain the standard theory in macroeconomics at an intermediate level; Explain and use the basic tools of macroeconomic theory, and apply them to help address problems in public policy; Analyze the role of government in allocating scarce resources; Explain how inflation affects entire economic systems; Synthesize the impact of employment and unemployment in a free market economy; Build macroeconomic models to describe changes over time in monetary and fiscal policy; Compare and contrast arguments concerning business, consumers and government, and make good conjectures regarding the possible solutions; Analyze the methods of computing and explaining how much is produced in an economy; Apply basic tools that are used in many fields of economics, including uncertainty, capital and investment, and economic growth. (Economics 202)

What an economist means when they say "investment" is different than what most people mean when they use it in day-to-day conversation. In this video, take a deeper dive into the investment category of real GDP. Created by Sal Khan.

GDP is the most commonly used measure of output, but it leaves some things out. Learn about the limitations of GDP in this video.

Potential output is an estimate of what the economy could produce. Actual output is what the economy does produce. If actual is below potential a negative output gap there is “slack” in the economy. If actual is above potential—a positive output gap—resources are fully employed, or perhaps overutilized. The May 2021 issue of Page One Economics® explains how the output gap is useful for checking the health of the economy. It also points out how errors in the estimation of potential real GDP can reduce the effectiveness of policy.