US GDP revised down in every first quarter from 2020 to 2022
By Lucia Mutikani
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — U.S. economic activity was either even weaker or not as strong as previously estimated in each of the first quarters of 2020, 2021 and 2022 amid downgrades mostly to consumer spending, revised government data showed on Thursday.
But the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the government agency that constructs the gross domestic product report, said there was no evidence that residual seasonality, which plagued the GDP data several years ago, was an issue.
The government adjusts economic data to remove fluctuations such as seasonal weather patterns and holidays that normally occur at roughly the same time and magnitude every year, to make the series easier to interpret and analyze. But seasonal effects have lingered in some cases even after the data was seasonally adjusted. This was most prevalent in first-quarter GDP data, before the government resolved the problem in 2018.
Back then, residual seasonality tended to understate economic growth in the first quarter.
«We put forward a whole set of protocols and mechanisms, which we were going to check to make sure we didn't have residual seasonality,» Dave Wasshausen, associate director, National Economic Accounts at the BEA told reporters.
«And so we continue to run all those tests, checks, just to see if there's residual seasonality and there is not any. We didn't see anything in particular that gave us pause about persistent components revised up or down.»
GDP in the first quarter of 2020 was revised down to show it contracting at a 5.3% annualized rate, instead of the previously reported 4.6% pace. But GDP for the whole of 2020 was upgraded by 0.6 percentage point to show the economy contracting 2.2% amid robust performances in
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