Wires are hot with news of the economy’s stunning performance in the first quarter. It’s like Arroyo got her Christmas gift early. At 6.9 percent, this is the country’s biggest year-on-year quarterly growth in the last 17 years. Only Vietnam with 7.7 percent and China with its 11.1 percent GDP had higher growth than the Philippines for the period.

Here’s the technical definition of GDP from Investopedia.com: The monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period, though GDP is usually calculated on an annual basis. It includes all of private and public consumption, government outlays, investments and exports less imports that occur within a defined territory.

For those who don’t care about the technical definition, just put a peso sign on every finished product and every service sold within the country for a certain period. Growth from quarter to quarter, year to year is the GDP growth rate. That’s about as simple as I can get. Economists use the GDP figure to measure economic growth.

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