On Calculating the Growth Contribution of the Expenditure Components of the German Gross Domestic Product Corrected for Import Shares

The article proposes an alternative way of calculating the consumption-side growth contributions in which the import of goods and services are distributed among the individual expenditure components according to their import shares. Accordingly, German exports played a far greater role in the recovery phase after the global financial and euro crisis than a traditional growth accounting would suggest. Instead of the purely mathematical foreign-trade contribution of 0.2 percentage points to the rise in real gross domestic product last year according to the traditional accounting, the growth contribution of exports, corrected for import shares, increased to 0.9 percentage points. Thus exports of goods and services account for over 40% of GDP growth of 2.2%.