The Obama Administration receives its first long-term economic report card in the coming week with the release Friday of the advance report of second-quarter gross domestic product, the first full quarter of the Obama presidency and stimulus plan.

The GDP report will test the optimism of economists who have been seeing green shoots in just about every number -- in some cases, looking past troubling warning signs. That said though, the biggest unknown for an economic revival has been and remains the consumer, with personal consumption representing more than 70% of the economy.

To be sure, the second quarter is expected to show further contraction of the nation’s economy -- the fourth consecutive quarter in which the economy grew smaller. The open question is by how much. Optimistic forecasts are GDP -- the sum of all goods and services of the U.S. economy -- declined by about 1.5% in the second quarter, which would be a sizable improvement from the first quarter when economic activity declined 5.5%. The fourth-quarter decline had been 6.3%.

Several elements contribute to the GDP report, many of them, according to monthly data, fall into the category of being “less bad” than earlier reports, but at least one is worse. In the first two months of the second quarter, personal consumption spending grew 0.3% which seems positive, but in the first two months of the first quarter, personal consumption spending grew 1.3%; for the entire first quarter personal consumption spending grew 1.4%. Personal consumption spending for the entire quarter will be incorporated in the GDP report but not detailed separately until early August. (Both data reports are compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.)

The retail sales report for June, representing about 40% of personal consumption spending, showed retail sales up 0.9% for the quarter, a shade better than the 0.8% sales improvement in the first quarter, feeding into the optimistic forecasts. Retail sales -- and thus total personal consumption -- was expected to increase faster with government stimulus money in two forms: reduced withholding rates for low-to-moderate income wage-earners as well as one-shot bonus payments to Social Security recipients and veterans. Both stimulus elements were expected to boost spending, but early reports suggest they flowed into savings rather than cash registers.

Another “less bad” element of prompting optimism should be investment in structures -- residential and non-residential -- as well as inventories though the latter is tied closely to consumption. The most positive contribution to the GDP report is likely to come from government spending which fell in the first quarter (from the fourth), followed by “net exports” reflecting weaker domestic spending on imported goods.

While there’s no official definition of a recession -- though a “folk definition” is back-to-back quarterly declines in GDP -- there is a textbook definition of an economic depression, a 10% drop in GDP from its peak. Through the first quarter, GDP is off 3.1% from its third quarter 2008 high, not a depression, but the largest decline since the 1957-58 recession, when GDP fell 2.5%.

The run-up to the GDP report should be tame with an expected increase in new home sales on the heels of a stronger-than-expected sales report of existing single family homes (all but ignoring the influence of distressed, foreclosed properties on both until sales and prices).

That report will be good news. On the other side of the ledger, Thursday’s report on initial will likely show another increase in unemployment claims after three weeks on relatively low claim numbers resulting from seasonal adjustments due to aberrations in the auto industry.

Mark Lieberman is the senior economist for the FOX Business Network. Prior to joining FOX, he served as first vice president and manager of economic analysis and research at Washington Mutual in New York. Before that, he served as senior vice president at Dime Savings Bank of New York (which was later acquired by Washington Mutual), where he specialized in credit and risk management. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the New York Association for Business Economics. He has a degree in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.