GDP Growth
The quarterly growth of real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the headline measure of how fast an economy grows: the change in the volume of everything produced, adjusted for inflation, seasonal patterns and the number of working days. Two consecutive quarters of negative growth is the common rule of thumb for a technical recession.
By default the growth is measured on the previous quarter (quarter on quarter), as Eurostat and the Office for National Statistics report it. Set year_over_year=True for the change on the same quarter a year earlier. The growth is not annualized, so a US figure is about a quarter of the annualized rate the Bureau of Economic Analysis headlines.
Every country comes from the most current source without an API key: Eurostat for the euro area and the countries it covers (including the preliminary flash estimate for the euro area, about thirty days after the quarter ends), the Office for National Statistics for the United Kingdom and the OECD Quarterly National Accounts for every other country, including the United States and Japan.
The growth is expressed as a decimal fraction (0.006 for 0.6%).
Also known as: GDP growth, real GDP growth, economic growth, quarter-on-quarter growth.
GDP Growth in Python
Install the Finance Toolkit with:
pip install financetoolkit -U
Then call get_gross_domestic_product_growth as shown below.
from financetoolkit import Economics
economics = Economics(start_date='2025-01-01', end_date='2026-09-30')
economics.get_gross_domestic_product_growth(
countries=['Euro Area', 'Germany', 'United Kingdom', 'United States', 'Japan']
)
Which returns:
| Euro Area | Germany | United Kingdom | United States | Japan | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025Q1 | 0.005 | 0.001 | 0.006 | 0.0004 | 0.005 |
| 2025Q2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.0099 | 0.0012 |
| 2025Q3 | 0.003 | 0 | 0.002 | 0.0096 | -0.0037 |
| 2025Q4 | 0.002 | 0.003 | 0 | 0.0005 | 0.0026 |
| 2026Q1 | 0 | 0.004 | 0.006 | 0.0062 | 0.0048 |
| 2026Q2 | 0.006 | 0.003 | 0.005 | 0.0055 | 0.0036 |
Parameters
The function accepts the following parameters:
- countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
- year_over_year (bool, optional): Whether to return the change on the same quarter a year earlier instead of on the previous quarter. Defaults to False.
- rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
- trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
- growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False.
- lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the growth data. Defaults to 1.
- standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
- rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.