Direct Gross Domestic Product and Economic Output

The two most common measures of economic contribution (in addition to employment) are gross domestic product (GDP) and economic output. Economic output roughly corresponds to the gross revenues of goods or services produced by an economic sector, while GDP measures only value-added revenues. As such, GDP removes the revenues to suppliers of intermediate goods and services and only includes the revenue from value-added production. Alternatively, economic output adds all revenues at each stage of production together as a measure of total production in the economy. Economic output will always be greater than GDP (also termed value-added).

To estimate economic output for a sector, one might add up the gross revenues of the various firms in that sector. However, to find GDP for a sector, care must be taken to avoid double-counting. The revenues of one firm providing service to another are not incremental GDP. For example, in the automobile sector, one cannot add the value (gross revenue) of a finished auto to the value of the tires. The tires are already included in the value of the automobile.

One approach to measuring economic output and value-added is to ask firms in a survey to provide information on their gross revenues, payments to suppliers, etc. However, there are several problems with the approach. First, it is much too expensive to capture all of this information in a survey. Second, the double counting problem makes this approach impractical.

An alternative is to infer economic output and GDP for an economic sector from employment data using economic multipliers. Statistics Canada produces economic multipliers for Canada, and these are more cost effective and more accurate than obtaining the data from surveys. This method, using Statistics Canada economic multipliers and ratios for Manitoba, is the approach adopted here.^[1]

Gross Domestic Product and Economic Output

The direct employment from current ongoing YWG operations generates approximately $1,260 million in direct GDP and $2,920 million in direct economic output, as shown in Figure 3-8 below.

Figure 3‑8: Annual Direct GDP and Economic Output Impacts at YWG in Manitoba, 2019

Impact	GDP	Economic Output
	(Millions)	(Millions)
Direct	$1,260	$2,920
Note: Dollar figures are expressed in 2019 prices.

• 1 The multipliers used for the analysis are based on Statistics Canada economic multipliers for Manitoba from the 2016 Interprovincial Input-Output model, the most recent data available. These multipliers were updated with Consumer Price Indices to account for inflation.