Undoubtedly, there is, as usual, a wealth of economic data in the press release issued by the National Statistics Office last Tuesday on our gross domestic product for this year’s second quarter.

What is probably of prime interest to most readers is the fact that it shows a handsome improvement of 3.9 per cent in real terms over 2009’s second quarter and also a 1.5 per cent improvement over this year’s first quarter, that is, +4.4 per cent nominal deflated by 2.9 points to account for inflation (naughty economy!).

We can now safely assume that the recession is behind us.

I cannot help commenting on two of the contributors to our GDP by way of calibrating occasional exaggerated utterances by our political leaders in their zeal to prove their point with regard to tourism and financial services.

Figures for the whole of 2009 indicate that the contribution of hotels and restaurants was no more than 4.4 per cent. Obviously, one needs to add on an unknown portion of transport, communications, retail and wholesale to evaluate the whole tourist industry’s GDP share. But even if the whole lot were to be attributed to tourism (which, of course, is not), it will still total only 22 per cent of GDP, a far cry from the 30-35 per cent widely bandied about. The contribution of financial intermediaries (which includes the banks) was just 5.8 per cent during 2009. Again, still quite a distance away from the claimed current 10 per cent with plans even to double it inside the next decade (I write this with trepidation!).