WASHINGTON – A claim from the final presidential debate and how it stacks up with the facts:

DONALD TRUMP: “So I just left some high representatives of India. They’re growing at 8 per cent. China is growing at 7 per cent. And that for them is a catastrophically low number. We are growing, our last report came out, and it’s right around the 1 per cent level and I think it’s going down. Last week, as you know, the end of last week, they came out with an anemic jobs report. A terrible jobs report.”

THE FACTS: China and India are growing faster in large part because they’re playing catch up to the United States, the world’s largest economy. Those two Asian countries are starting from a much lower baseline with a much larger population than the United States, meaning that by definition that they should be growing faster. Economists would warn of a dangerous bubble if the United States grew that quickly and financial markets would fear a devastating recession to follow.

But China and India aren’t any better off than the U.S., said former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in an analysis released Wednesday. On a per-capita basis, China has just 10 per cent of the United States’ income. India has about 6 per cent.

Factoring in life expectancy, inequality and leisure, Bernanke notes that the United States comes off even better. And the September jobs report that Trump calls “terrible” is actually viewed by most economists as encouraging. Employers added 156,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate ticked up to 5 per cent because more Americans felt confident enough to start looking for jobs, a positive sign.

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Contributed by Associated Press writer Josh Boak.

EDITOR’S NOTE _ A look at the veracity of claims by political figures