PL: A strong fourth quarter in Poland

Today, we received the flash estimate for Q4 2024 economic growth. In seasonally unadjusted terms, Polish GDP expanded by 3.2% year-on-year. When accounting for seasonality, the annual growth rate was 3.7%, with a robust quarter-on-quarter increase of 1.3%. These figures were anticipated, as we had already received the full-year GDP growth estimate at the end of January.

As the detailed breakdown will be available in approximately two weeks, there is little new to report at this time. From the full-year estimate, we can infer that Q4 consumption increased by approximately 3.4% year-on-year, while investments remained flat. Nonetheless, today's data contains several interesting pieces of information. Firstly, the seasonally adjusted data has been revised once again. The most relevant revision occurred in Q3 quarterly growth, which was adjusted upwards by 0.2 percentage points, thereby pushing the figure into positive territory at +0.1% quarter-on-quarter.

Secondly, the released figure was still 0.2 percentage points below market consensus, despite analysts having access to the full-year figure to calculate the Q4 growth rate. This discrepancy arises because the 3.2% Q4 growth implies an annual expansion of 2.8%, not the 2.9% reported in January. However, this is merely a matter of decimal precision, where finer granularity is not available.