Measuring GDP Growth.

Economists use many different methods to measure how fast the economy is growing. The most common way to measure the economy is real gross domestic product, or real GDP. GDP is the total value of everything--goods and services--produced in our economy. The word "real" means that the total has been adjusted to remove the effects of inflation. The other way to measure economic growth is GDP per capita. There are at least three different ways …

…seasonal variations. The year-over-year growth rate tends to be somewhat less volatile than quarterly growth at an annual rate . That is because the effect of any special factors does not get compounded. But it is also less timely, since it looks at what happened to the economy over the entire previous year, not just the past three months. Finally, the annual average growth rate is the average of year-over-year percentage changes reported during a year.