In just over a week we will have an official update on Australia’s battle to avoid being branded with the R word.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will issue the national accounts for the June quarter on Wednesday, September 2.

The accounts will include the bureau’s estimate of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) in the quarter.

That single figure will inevitably be used to judge Australia’s performance against the standard, albeit arbitrary, yardstick by which recessions are commonly gauged - two consecutive quarters of declining GDP.

That stigma has been avoided so far.

The GDP estimate, along with the flurry of June quarter data released ahead of it, should go a long way to clarifying the economic picture.

After a thin rise of 0.2 per cent in the September quarter of 2008, GDP fell by 0.6 per cent in real, seasonally adjusted terms in the December quarter - a sharp fall as far as GDP goes.

After that news, expectations were rife that the March quarter would make it two in a row.

Things turned out better than expected, though, with the news in June of a rise of 0.4 per cent, supported by solid contributions to growth from household spending, rising exports and a lower proportion of domestic spending directed to imports.

There is a good chance the June quarter figures will show another rise.

The latest forecasts from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) include expectations of a rise of a quarter per cent over the year to the June quarter, implying a small rise, in the order of 0.2 per cent, in the June quarter itself.

Most private sector economists have not firmed up their own forecasts, but there is no strong reason at the moment to predict a significant change in GDP, either up or down, in the quarter.

The risks seem to be skewed toward a positive result.

We already know retail trade has posted its biggest rise in the June quarter for nearly two years and aggregate hours worked fell at a slower rate than in the previous two quarters.

Figures released in the lead-up to the national accounts will fill in many of the large gaps remaining in the GDP jigsaw puzzle.

On Wednesday this coming week the ABS will release its estimate of construction work done in the quarter and, with some overlap, business capital spending on Thursday.

In the following week, Monday will bring business inventories, company and small business profits and aggregate wages data in the ABS “Business Indicators” publication.

The next day, Tuesday September 1, estimates of government spending and real-term exports and imports will be added to the mix.

By that stage, economists should have a reasonably good idea how the June quarter GDP result will pan out.

Reasonable, that is, but not perfect.

The March quarter rise still surprised most economists even though forecasts had been revised upward to reflect unexpected strength evident in the data released shortly before the national accounts.

The ABS estimate of GDP is the average of three measures, which in theory should give the same result but in reality does not.

The expenditure-based measure rose by 1.1 per cent in the March quarter and the income-based measure increased by 0.9 per cent but the production-based measure contracted by 0.9 per cent.

The truth is in there somewhere, but economists are unsure which - if any - of the three, or the 0.4 per cent rise obtaining by averaging them, is telling it.

So this time the uncertainty factor will be bigger than normal.

That will simply add to the intensity of the focus on the June quarter data due in the coming week or so.

AAP