British GDP up 0.7% in Q4, 1.9% for whole year

Britain's gross domestic product (GDP) in the fourth quarter of 2013 grew by 0.7 percent compared with the third quarter last year, data showed by Office for National Statistics (ONS) Tuesday. The whole year's GDP expanded by 1.9 percent last year, the best performance since 2007. The figures is in line with the market expectation. Meanwhile, compared with the QoQ growth rate of 0.8 percent in the second and third quarter of 2013, the fourth quarter's growth was slightly weaker. Output of agriculture in the fourth quarter increased by 0.5 percent, compared with the third quarter of 2013, while production and services industries output grew by 0.7 and 0.8 percent respectively. However, the construction output decreased by 0.3 percent, data showed by ONS. The GDP's weights of services, production, construction and agriculture stand at 77.8 percent, 15.2 percent, 6.3 percent and 0.7 percent respectively. "In levels terms, the UK's economy's performance remains pretty insipid compared with other major economies," said Martin Beck, British Economist at Capital Economics, a London-based economic research company. "With rising real incomes set to provide stronger support for household spending and investment set to pick up, we expect GDP to expand by a healthy 3 percent in 2014", added Beck.