UBS On-Air: Paul Donovan Daily Audio 'Negative growth and “recession”'

The word “recession” is a curse cast on the economics profession. There is no formal, universal definition. The media’s obsession with “two consecutive quarters of negative growth” is increasingly meaningless in the modern world. Output economic measures like GDP depend on how many people are working, and how hard those people are working. Thus, countries with declining populations are more likely to have falling GDP, but are not more likely to have falling living standards.