Thursday, August 21, 2008

U.S. Sees Biggest GDP Gain out of Major Seven OECD Countries

The GDP number, being an aggregation of a bunch of other aggregations, is not the kind of number you want to bet your life on for accuracy. Further,it fails to take into account that some goods may be produced at cross purposes--whch will ultimately result in losses for some. So take ths OECD decimal point accuracy of this report with a grain of salt. The report gives a rough, rough sense of what is going on, and that is all:

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development area saw its gross domestic product rise by 0.2% in the second quarter –- down from 0.5% in the previous quarter, according to initial estimates.The U.S. saw the biggest GDP gain out of the Major Seven countries in the OECD with a 0.5% increase. Japan’s GDP dropped 0.6%, the biggest decline out of the Major Seven and the largest quarterly decrease seen since the third quarter of 2001. The 15-country euro area’s GDP declined by 0.2%.

The U.S. contributed 0.6 of a percentage point to the total OECD growth of 1.9% between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2008. Japan contributed 0.1 of a percentage point, while the euro area contributed 0.4 and the remaining countries 0.8.

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