The International Monetary Fund has come out with its latest set of forecasts of the world economy. The report says at one point:
“The IMF staff now sees a 25 percent chance that global growth will drop to 3 percent or less in 2008 and 2009—equivalent to a global recession.”
Since when is 3% growth equivalent to a “global recession”? According to my textbook, periods of negative GDP growth are called recessions.
By this “new’ definition, the world economy has been in recession 1980-83, 1990-93, 1998, and 2001-2002. In other words, 11 out of the last 28 years. There are no negative years of world growth.
Here are the IMF’s latest world growth numbers, and forecasts out to 2013.
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