Abstract:We propose a new quantitative recession magnitude scale for measuring recessions' magnitudes ('strength') derived from GDP growth rates during a recession and its duration. Furthermore, we introduce a qualitative scale with four recession categories: minor, major, severe and ultra, where the categories are defi ned by the magnitude scale. We use both scales to evaluate several well known economic recessions of the 20 th and the 21 st centuries. We have found that the Great Depression in 1929-1933 and recessions in Russia and Ukraine in the 1990s belong to ultra recessions, while the recent 2007-2009 fi nancial crisis falls mainly into major (EU and Japan) and severe (USA) category.
The problem of the prediction of business cycles, and economic recessions in particular, belongs among the most important topics of contemporary macroeconomics. However, economists were not considerably successful when dealing with the recession forecasting so far, notably, the Great Recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s emerged rather surprisingly. The aim of this paper is to examine the statistical relationship (in terms of Granger causality) between the Consumer Confi dence Index (CCI) and real GDP growth in the USA from 1960 to 2015 in order to fi nd whether the CCI can be a suitable predictor of the economic growth, or economic recessions respectively.
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