Depression? Or just a recession?

From The TimesFebruary 9, 2009

Depression? Or just a recession? Experts also find it hard to tell
This week: After Gordon Brown talked of a new Depression, we explain the phenomenon.

How is an economic depression different from a recession?

First of all, it is important to understand that there is no precise or agreed definition of a depression. Even now, 70 years after the last experience of the 1930s economic slump that became know as the Great Depression, the world's leading economists are still wrangling over what caused it and what it meant. Defining the term is made more difficult since the last experience of anything like a depression was in this period, more than seven decades ago, which is well beyond many people's living memory.

In general, it is accepted by most commentators and experts that a depression is a very severe form of recession: one involving a deeper decline in GDP and most other measures of economic welfare, including employment, and which probably lasts for significantly longer than the typical recessions experienced in modern times.

How different is the scale of a depression from a recession?

Very different. In modern times, the typical experience of recession in big Western economies has been a period of declining GDP that has lasted perhaps three to six quarters, and the typical fall in GDP over the period of recession has been in the order of 1 to 3 per cent. Some recessions have been even briefer and less deep, but all of these have still been bad enough to cause considerable hardship and to alter the business landscape significantly.

By contrast, the Great Depression in the United States stretched from 1929 to 1933, and involved a collapse in the economy that saw national output and income shrink by 29.6per cent. GDP dropped by 8.6per cent in 1930 alone, by 6.4 per cent in 1931 and by 13 per cent in 1932. Recovery in 1934 to 1937 was followed by a relapse into recession. It was only the huge rise in industrial production in the US war economy of the early Forties that ended this profound period of economic woes in America.

What was the toll from this slump?

The impact was brutal. The proportion of the workforce without jobs surged from 2 per cent to a quarter of those of working age. Output from US factories was halved, consumer prices fell by a quarter as the economy slid into deflation, four-fifths of the value of the US stock market was wiped out, from the Wall Street crash onwards, and house prices fell by nearly a third.

What about Britain in the Depression?

Britain's experience of the Thirties was grim and painful, but far from as searing as that of the US. British GDP plunged by about 5 per cent, compared with the 2.9 per cent drop suffered in the worst modern recession in the early Eighties. During the early Thirties, British unemployment doubled from 7 to 15per cent of the workforce. However, this experience was much less severe than the slump that the UK suffered in the early Twenties. Although that is not part of what we know as “the Great Depression”, it clearly was a depression on the same scale. In the wake of the First World War, UK GDP plummeted by 23 per cent, mirroring the experience of America a decade later.

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