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In macroeconomics, a recession is a decline in a country's gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth, for two or more successive quarters of a year. However, in the United States the official designation of recessions is done by the business-cycle dating committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research.[1] That Bureau defines a recession more ambiguously as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months." A recession may involve simultaneous declines in coincident measures of overall economic activity such as employment, investment, and corporate profits. Recessions may be associated with falling prices (deflation), or, alternatively, sharply rising prices (inflation) in a process known as stagflation. A severe or long recession is referred to as an economic depression. A devastating breakdown of an economy (essentially, a severe depression, or a hyperinflation, depending on the circumstances) is called economic collapse. Newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris distinguished terms this way: "a recession is when you lose your job; a depression is when I lose mine."
On November 26, 2001, the news media announced the United States was officially in a recession, and had been since March. To most Americans, this wasn't all that surprising: Rising unemployment and a weak stock market had been in the news for months.
But the announcement did raise a lot of questions. Who decides when the economy is in recession, and on what grounds? What actually constitutes a recession anyway?
In this article, we'll find out what recessions are, see why they occur, and examine the criteria economists use to identify them. We'll also look at the effects of recession as well as explore some of the ways a country can turn the economy around again.
Recession: The Newspaper Definition
The standard newspaper definition of a recession is a decline in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more consecutive quarters.
This definition is unpopular with most economists for two main reasons. First, this definition does not take into consideration changes in other variables. For example this definition ignores any changes in the unemployment rate or consumer confidence. Second, by using quarterly data this definition makes it difficult to pinpoint when a recession begins or ends. This means that a recession that lasts ten months or less may go undetected.
Recession: The BCDC Definition
The Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) provides a better way to find out if there is a recession is taking place. This committee determines the amount of business activity in the economy by looking at things like employment, industrial production, real income and wholesale-retail sales. They define a recession as the time when business activity has reached its peak and starts to fall until the time when business activity bottoms out. When the business activity starts to rise again it’s called an expansionary period. By this definition, the average recession lasts about a year.