Thursday's GDP data disappointed the markets somewhat. And policy makers like the Reserve Bank may have been disappointed too.

But how do you feel about this data?

It is supposed to represent a measure of the formal economy, and most readers will be a part of it in some way.

Most will participate by earning an income and spending it as consumers.

That is a core part of Gross Domestic Product, which is a measure of final transactions, rather than the intermediate ones most businesses are involved in.

+3.0% real annual growth has in fact been +4.2% after the 1.2% price deflator has been applied.

But GDP stats at "chain-volume 2009/10" prices are hard things to get your head around. When inflation is low, it is much easier to think about this data on a current prices basis.

And that involves more than just the inflation adjustment.

On a current prices basis, our economy is running at an economic rate of $265 bln per year. And actually, that is +5.6% more than it was running in the year to March 2016.

On a per-capita basis, it is growing at +1.8% pa in the year to March. There is a bit of an urban myth around that per-capita we are not growing.

However there may be something to the feeling that things aren't expanding for many people at quite the same rate as the overall numbers suggest.

In theory, we should be able to measure the share of the economy that people on wages and salaries contribute. You can do that in other countries, but not reliably here. Statistics NZ say they are working on getting that data, but it may be a year or two before they are ready to publish. The issue for them is getting the data to the standard they require.

But we can make an estimate based on other compensation data published by them. There are issues with the data we have, especially in the quantum. But at least we know what the missing bits are. And we can find a trend.

The question is: are people on wages and salaries growing their share of GDP, or are they losing share?

The pub test will likely 'prove' the latter - workers are losing share. But is that really true?

Compensation data is published in the Quarterly Employment Survey (QES) and this can be used to build a related data set.

On that basis, we find that in the year to March 2017, 34.3% of nominal GDP was for employee pay.

In the year to March 2016, that share was 34.5%.

Five years ago the share was 33.2%.

Ten years ago (pre GFC) the share was 33.6%.

Twenty-five years ago the share was 34.9%.

The variations from today are remarkably small. Basically, employees are maintaining their 'share' of our economy. True, they are not winning a greater share, but equally, they are not losing share either.

The numbers used here will be higher when Statistics NZ eventually release official data. That is because the QES under accounts for the self-employed, for some pay at micro businesses, and for much non-cash compensation that should be included. But it is unlikely that the overall trend of a stable share will change.

The data we have set out is over a longish time-frame.

But over a shorter set, we may have some interesting, and worrying elements developing.

On the QES/GDP basis we have used, the change in compensation as a proportion of the change in GDP (in other words, the incremental share) does not look so flash. In the year to March 2017, GDP grew by $14.2 billion whereas compensation grew by $4.3 bln. That means in the latest year those on wages and salaries saw their share of the growth in the economy grow by only +30.6%, a lesser share than the overall 34.3% share. And that is the lowest share at an annual rate since mid 2014.

This is only a taster of the data, and very unofficial. Relating QES data to the GDP has issues because of the way the QES survey is constructed. But it is the best we have at this time.

But we can rest assured that workers are not going backwards.