2

When I try to google for countries in a recession, all that I find is fear mongering about a specific country or a list of countries that the author deems to be "on the verge of recession". However, that's not what I'm interested in at all.

I'm looking for countries whose economy is down at least half to where it was roughly 2 or 3 years ago.

It seems to me that either a country is big enough so that everyone knows about its recession from the media or it's so small that there is no ETF for its economy so that I could find it by checking country ETFs.

The only one I was able to find is Argentina. But I read about that in a random blog and then confirmed that it is in a recession by checking its MSCI index. So that was by accident.

How do I strategically find such countries?

Edit: It was brought to my attention that I misunderstood the term "recession". I have therefore updated the title. As I explained above, I'm looking for countries that recently have had at least half of their economy's value wiped out. I'd update the tag but there is no depression tag.

UTF-8
  • 924
  • 1
  • 6
  • 15

2 Answers2

3

A recession is simply a situation where a country or state has had two consecutive quarter of negative GDP growth. If you want to know which countries are in a recession, simply take their GDP over the last two quarters and verify that it has shrunk on both quarters consecutively.

This type of data is usually produced and published by central banks or statistics offices, they should be your trusted source unless you have the luxury of having a reliable data provider.

ApplePie
  • 2,279
  • 15
  • 18
1

It might depend a bit on whether you're interested in the overall size of the economy, GDP per capita or purchasing power but I don't think there is any country in the world in that situation right now.

Venezuela has seen its GDP shrink a lot but still not by half and not over 2-3 years (but over 4 or 5). Syria is a good candidate and the only country I could find that has probably lost that much output in a relatively short period of time but the war and destruction still unfolded over a period longer than three years and there are no authoritative figures for recent years. Argentina is nowhere near that level of economic decline.

Relaxed
  • 1,065
  • 7
  • 11