by Calculated Risk on 6/27/2007 07:53:00 PM

Tomorrow the "final" GDP report will be released for Q1. Of course the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) keeps on revising the estimate for some time, so "final" is just a name for the report.

In the near future, I'd expect the BEA to look into the suggestion by Business Week that offshoring has led to an overstatement of GDP in recent years. Most analysts think that Business Week is correct, but the overstatement is probably less than 0.2% per year.

Click on graph for larger image.

The BEA releases three GDP reports per quarter: Advance, Preliminary and Final. This chart shows the release numbers for each release, and also the current estimate for each quarter for the last few years.

Although it seems that the estimates change substantially, they are actually pretty similar from a macro perspective.

For tomorrow, I've seen estimates for the "final" Q1 report ranging from 0.4% to 1.5%. The consensus is 0.8%, mostly because of changes to net imports.