History of GDP growth.

GDP is the Gross Domestic Product and it is a basic measure of an economy's production. According to Wikipedia: Nominal GDP growth is GDP growth in nominal prices (unadjusted for price changes). and Real GDP growth is GDP growth adjusted for price changes.

The St. Louis Federal reserve has GDP data going back to 1947 at this page. The Data 360 website has this page that shows year to year % GDP growth based on the data.

A visual plot of the annual Nominal GDP % growth is below for 1947 to Q2 of 2008:


And the Real GDP growth for the same period is below:
Average Nominal GDP growth is 6.77% per year and average Real GPD increased 3.32%. Nominal GDP was negative only 12 quarters out of 245 or about 5% of the time and Real GDP was down 37 out of 245 quarters for about 15% of the time.