The beauty about economics is that you can have one number and a myriad of different interpretations.
Take China’s GDP growth for 2015 for example. There is the annual growth rate of 6.9 percent. That one is pretty straightforward. It means that output in the world’s second-largest economy is now 6.9 percent larger than at the end of 2014.
And 6.9 percent is pretty high absolutely speaking, although it is quite a bit lower than the 7.3 percent growth of 2014.
Then there is the fourth quarter of 2015. Here it becomes a little bit tricky. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2014, GDP was 6.8 percent higher, missing analysts’ expectations of 6.9 percent. Note that we are comparing only the output produced in the last three months of the years of 2014 and 2015, respectively.
