Global recession

The International Monetary Fund defines a global recession as "a decline in annual per‑capita real World GDP (purchasing power parity weighted), backed up by a decline or worsening for one or more of the seven other global macroeconomic indicators: Industrial production, trade, capital flows, oil consumption, unemployment rate, per‑capita investment, and per‑capita consumption".

In a 1974 New York Times article, Julius Shiskin suggested several rules of thumb to identify a recession, which included two successive quarterly declines in gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the nation's output.

In the United States, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is regarded as the authority which identifies a recession and which takes into account several measures in addition to GDP growth before making an assessment.

[10] According to the IMF, the real GDP growth of the emerging and developing countries is on an uptrend and that of advanced economies is on a downtrend since the late 1980s.

Countries in East Asia (including China) have suffered smaller declines because their financial situations are more robust.

Countries by real GDP growth rate (2009)
Countries by real GDP growth rate (2014)
Number of countries having a banking crisis in each year since 1800. This is based on This time is different: Eight centuries of financial folly , which covers only 70 countries. The general upward trend might be attributed to many factors. One of these is a gradual increase in the percent of people who receive money for their labor. The dramatic feature of this graph is the virtual absence of banking crises during the period of the Bretton Woods agreement , 1945 to 1971. This analysis is similar to Figure 10.1 in Reinhart and Rogoff (2009). For more details see the help file for "bankingCrises" in the Ecdat package available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).