Last month, the OECD published its latest Economic Outlook, which downgraded expectations for rich-country growth this year. This post digs a little deeper into the OECD database and compares how the private and public sectors have changed over the past three years. It finds that the private sector is paying more to get less in most countries – except the US, Japan and Ireland. It also finds an effective stimulus in the OECD of about 6% of GDP in 2010, compared to 2007. This is largest and – as spending-led – perhaps least sustainable in Ireland and in Denmark.
This post uses the latest IMF World Economic Outlook to examine which countries have been affected most by the recession. Looking at 2010-2013 growth rates, it breaks the recession’s impact down into two periods, the initial economic crisis and the subsequent rebound over the past 12 months. It finds that the recent recovery is very broadly based.
This post examines the latest OECD data, to see which economies have been most affected by “lost trade” during the Great Recession, especially as it is being rewritten in the light of eurozone/PIIGS crisis. It turns out that the nature of the exporting sector, and not the government’s finances, has determined a country’s trading success since 2008, with drug-exporting Ireland and Switzerland among the least affected, while Finland (ICT) and Japan (cars) find themselves among the most affected.
This post extends a February comparison of private sector job losses in recent US recessions to include the latest data, finding that the last six months have seen no significant recovery in employment numbers. It then compares the current recession to the Great Depression.
What if unemployment in Ireland reaches 25% next year? What if GDP falls a quarter between 2007 and 2012? The spectre of the Great Depression looms over us large at the moment and there has been much commentary of late – see for example Robert Samuelson’s recent blog post – on whether and how our [...]
I have just discovered a set of global trade statistics updated monthly by the Dutch Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB). (Incidentally, this is not the first time I’ve come across excellent work by the CPB – their work on administrative burdens imposed by regulation is essentially the international pioneer on the topic and has [...]
