The Counterfeit Nature of GDP and the Countervailing Logic of Global Circulation Rights——A Critical Analysis Based on the Title-Circulation Right Framework

Abstract

Since the establishment of the modern macroeconomic system, GDP has been universally recognized by governments, research institutions, and mainstream academia as the exclusive core indicator for measuring economic growth, national welfare, and comprehensive national strength. In mainstream narratives, rising GDP aggregates equate to social progress, export expansion equates to mutually beneficial trade, and the export-oriented model has long been regarded as the standard modernization path for late-developing economies. This cognitive paradigm underpins the fundamental logic of global macro-regulation, industrial layout, and opening-up strategies. Nevertheless, the traditional paradigm suffers from structural and fundamental cognitive blind spots. GDP only records monetized market flow transactions and completely conceals stock rights transfer, individual rights depreciation, and institutional value extraction. GDP growth merely inflates book figures while consuming residents’ long-term development rights and undermining the future growth potential of economies. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty ，Acemoglu and other scholars proposed the classic institutional binary framework, categorizing social institutions as inclusive or extractive and attributing national wealth gaps to institutional differences. While this framework effectively explains the impact of macroscopic institutional forms on economic performance, it bears critical limitations. Its static binary division cannot explain substantive rights extraction under nominally inclusive institutions. Even economies with sound property rights and market systems may experience systematic individual value extraction if core privileges over circulation access, profit pricing, and cross-border transaction flows are monopolized, resulting in a structural paradox of “nominal institutional inclusion and substantive rights extraction”. To fill this theoretical gap, this paper adopts the original TCR analytical framework and upgrades the traditional static binary institutional paradigm into a quantifiable, deducible, and modelable continuous variable system. By introducing the core parameters of individual TCR aggregation rate and rights return rate, this study establishes a formal theoretical channel connecting institutional economics and circulation rights distribution. By constructing a three-dimensional conversion model covering TCR, GDP, and foreign exchange, this paper fully dedu

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