Real Versus Nominal Value (economics) - Uses and Examples

Uses and Examples

Nominal values—such as nominal wages or (nominal) gross domestic product—refer to amounts that are paid or earned in money terms. In the illustration of the previous section, for a single good with a nominal value, the nominal value of the good was divided by its unit price to calculate its real value, namely the quantity of the good. The same general method applies for calculation of other real values, except that a price index is used instead of the price of a single commodity. Real values (such as real wages or real gross domestic product) can be derived by dividing the relevant nominal value (money wages or nominal GDP) by the appropriate price index. For consumers, a relevant bundle of goods is that used to compute the Consumer Price Index. So, for wage earners as consumers a relevant real wage is the nominal wage (after-tax) divided by the CPI. A relevant divisor of nominal GDP is the GDP price index.

Real values represent the purchasing power of nominal values in a given period, including wages, interest, or total production. In particular, price indexes are typically calculated relative to some base year. If for example the base year is 1992, real values are expressed in constant 1992 dollars, referenced as 1992=100, since the published index is usually normalized to equal 100 in the base year. To use the price index as a divisor for converting a nominal value into a real value, as in the previous section, the published index is first divided by the base-year price-index value of 100. In the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts, nominal GDP is called GDP in current dollars (that is, in prices current for each designated year), and real GDP is called GDP in dollars (that is, in dollars that can purchase the same quantity of commodities as in the base year). In effect the price index of 100 for the base year is a numéraire for price-index values in other years.

The terminology of classical economics used by Adam Smith used a unit of labour as the purchasing power unit, so monetary quantities were deflated by wages to indicate the number of hours of labour required to produce or purchase a given quantity.