The upshot has been to pare back growth previously reported, including three of the four quarters to June 2014.
Annual growth for the year to June 2014 has been revised down from 3.9 per cent to 3.2 per cent, while annual average growth (which compares the average output over the latest four quarters with the average over the four quarters a year earlier) has dropped from 3.5 per cent to 2.8 per cent.
Annual average growth for the year to September 2014 is 2.9 per cent, which is the best since March 2008, when it was 3 per cent.
ASB economist Jane Turner said Statistics NZ's revisions to history, which lower the pace of growth from 2010 to 2014, could potentially provide some explanation of why non-tradeable inflation had been softer than expected.
"If this is the case, the Reserve Bank may have to revisit its assumption that the economy can grow at a stronger rate of growth without generating a lift in inflation pressures," she said.
Westpac economist Michael Gordon said the picture was now one of an economy that had been trotting rather than galloping along since it emerged from recession in 2009, and as a result was probably less capacity-constrained than the previous figures suggested.
"For some time now we, the Reserve Bank, and other forecasters have been puzzling over the New Zealand economy's ability to grow without inflation. By taking an axe to the first part of that story, the new GDP figures help to explain the second part - inflation is low because the economy has not been growing all that rapidly."
But Bank of New Zealand economist Craig Ebert said that regardless of what the revised GDP data might be telling us about the economy's speed limit over recent years, they did not change the fact that the unemployment rate had fallen from 7.1 per cent to 5.4 per cent, indicative of an economy running above trend, whatever that trend might be.
"Nor do they change the fact that various business surveys have relayed a sense of diminishing spare capacity over recent years, to the point now of expressing a bit of excess demand," he said.
The biggest single contributor to the September quarter's 1 per cent output growth was a 4.7 per cent rise in agricultural production, led by a strong start to the dairy season but supported by drystock farming.
Mining activity was up 8 per cent, the highest quarterly gain for five years, reflecting both increased oil and gas production and a rise in exploration activity.
Construction activity dropped back 1.2 per cent in the quarter, though it was still up 11.5 per cent on a year earlier.
The services sector, which makes up 64 per cent of the economy, was a mixed bag but up 0.3 per cent overall in the quarter.
On the expenditure side of the books, the quarter's rise of 1.3 per cent follows 0.2 per cent in the June quarter (revised down from 0.5 per cent). The average across the past two quarters of 0.75 per cent is the same as the average of the two preceding quarters.
The latest result is buoyed by a brisk 1.5 per cent rise in household consumption, with spending on durables like vehicles and furniture featuring prominently.
Business investment was up 3.7 per cent in the quarter, reflecting a 9.3 per cent increase in spending on plant, machinery and equipment, which does not include a 16 per cent increase in transport equipment.
The strength of business investment is one reason, along with the boost to the labour supply from net immigration, cited by the Treasury this week for raising its estimate of the potential or non-inflationary growth rate of the economy these days to close to 3 per cent.
The numbers: Three months to September 30
• Rise in economic output: 1%
• rise in agricultural production: 4.7%
• rise in mining activity: 8%
• Fall in construction activity: 1.2%
• Rise in the services sector: 0.3%
