国际英语新闻：German economy expands 0.7% in Q3

FRANKFURT, Nov. 23 (Xinhua) -- Private and public consumption, gross investments and exports drove the continued upturn of the German economy, a detailed breakdown of the data released by the Federal Statistics Office (Destatis) showed Tuesday, adding to evidence that the economy entered the next stage of a typical recovery with increasingly self-sustainable growth.

The gross domestic product (GDP) in the third quarter of 2010 was 0.7 percent higher upon price, seasonal and calendar adjustment than in the second quarter and 3.9 percent higher on a year-to-year basis, confirming the preliminary estimate published by Destatis on Nov. 12.

Destatis reported that the economic growth was based on both domestic and foreign demand.

Domestic uses accounted for the larger share in GDP growth in the reference quarter: Household final consumption expenditure rose 0.4 percent and government final consumption expenditure increased by 1.1 percent. Gross investments grew by 1.3 percent. Foreign trade supported the upswing of the economy in the third quarter.

The growth rate of 2.3 percent in exports of goods and services on the previous quarter was slightly larger than 1.9 percent in imports, so that the export surplus contributed 0.3 percentage points to GDP growth.

Inventories were the only drag to growth in the third quarter, suggesting that the inventory cycle had reached the top in the first half of the year German Economy Minister Rainer Brderle said in a separate statement that growth of German economy stood on a broad basis and was now increasingly domestically driven after initially led by foreign trade.

Some economists said that very solid growth numbers confirmed the very healthy shape of the German economy. They expected domestic demand to continue to grow solidly while exports somewhat damped by fiscal tightening and sluggish labor markets throughout the euro zone.