CN’s Official 1Q15 GDP Growth'd Be 5.7% But for Collapsing Commodity Prices

choi

Tom Mitchell, Commodities Fall Saves China’s Blushes. Financial Times, July 6, 2015 (available now).
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4a0457 ... e-a775d2b173ca.html

Quote:

"according to a breakdown of first-quarter GDP that has only recently become available, net exports contributed 1.3 percentage points of the 7 per cent growth.  By comparison, net exports contributed just 0.1 percentage points of the 7.4 per cent growth reported for the whole of 2014 — which was China’s slowest annual rate of expansion in a quarter of a century.  Consumption and investment, meanwhile, accounted for 4.5 and 1.2 percentage points of first-quarter growth respectively. Without the boost from net exports, first-quarter growth would have been much * * * at about 5.7 per cent.

"First-quarter exports were up only a modest 4.9 per cent on the same period last year * * * But the collapse in global commodity prices meant that the value of China’s imports over the first three months of the year fell 17 per cent

Note:
(a) save/spare somebody's blushes: " (British & Australian)  to do something to prevent someone feeling embarrassed"
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/save+blushes
(b) gross domestic product
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product
(section 2.3.1 Components of GDP by expenditure)

Actually there is a fourth component: government spending, which is larger than investment (at least in US). See the table to the right of this sub-section.