People reading the NYT article on European economic growth saw that GDP in France grew by just 0.3 percent in third quarter, by 0.7 percent in Germany, and by 0.4 percent for the euro zone countries taken as a whole. If that sounds very weak, it is because these numbers are expressed as quarterly growth rates, which is the standard practice in Europe. However, in the United States, the standard practice is to express GDP growth numbers at annual rates. No one ever reports GDP as a quarterly growth rate. Since the point of the news story is to provide accurate information to readers, why not just report the European growth numbers as annual rates? Multiplying by four will do the trick. (Actually, we should take the growth number to the fourth power, but for these numbers the result will be the same.) There is no excuse for not reporting data in the way that makes it most understandable to readers.
--Dean Baker
