Recently, there's been a tendency for people to try to expand the definition of recessions. You see people talking about declines per capita GDP in Australia, or "manufacturing recessions" in various countries.
I'd like to see us go in the other direction, tightening the definition. In the past, I've discussed three "phony recessions" in Japan during the past nine years. In each case, there was a brief period of negative RGDP growth, and then a rebound, with no increase in the unemployment rate. Because Japan has a rapidly falling population, its trend rate of RGDP