RWIU - Defining Recessions When Negative Growth Is Too Common Or Too Rare

This post follows up on "What Determines When a Recession is Recession?" which pointed out some drawbacks of defining a recession by two negative quarters of growth.

In some countries there is another, more fundamental, basis for questioning the two-quarter rule for determining recession, or any GDP-based rule. Some countries experience sharp slowdowns or periods of diminished economic activity and yet their long-term trend growth rates are either so high or so low that the negative-growth rule does not capture what is needed to describe the cyclical state of the economy. For such

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