Against this background, this paper examines the main features of global recessions and the ensuing recoveries and expansions. Specifically, it addresses three questions. First, what happens during global recessions and recoveries? Second, how do global recessions and recoveries vary across different groups of countries, particularly advanced economies, EMDEs, and low-income countries (LICs)? Third, what happens during global expansions and how does the current global expansion compare with previous ones?

The paper builds on an extensive literature on various aspects of global and national business cycles.<sup>1</sup> A branch of this research documents the growing importance of global business cycles in explaining national cycles (e.g., Kose, Otrok, and Whiteman 2003, 2008; and Mumtaz, Simonelli, and Surico 2011). A second branch focuses on the roles played by trade and financial linkages in the cross-border transmission of business cycles.<sup>2</sup> A third branch studies the turning points of the global business cycle and its phases.<sup>3</sup> Our study is closely related to Kose and Terrones (2015; KT going forward), which presented the first detailed account of global recessions. KT mostly focused on global recessions and recoveries using annual data for 163 countries over 1960-2012. They presented a detailed review of the relevant literature, analyzed how financial crises lead to recessions, and examined the interactions between global and national cycles. KT’s work builds on Rogoff, Robinson, and Bayoumi (2002), which briefly examined whether the 2001 worldwide downturn was a global recession. Rogoff, Robinson, and Bayoumi (2002) focused on movements in per capita GDP growth to identify episodes that could be labeled as global recessions. They emphasized the importance of statistical and judgmental approaches to identify the turning points of the global business cycle.

This paper extends the literature in four dimensions. First, it covers a longer time span of annual series (1950-2019) and a larger set of economies (180). Second, it is the first study that presents an analysis of the phases of the global business cycle with quarterly output series of 106 countries over the period 1960:1-2019:3. Third, it expands on the set of macroeconomic and financial variables that KT analyzed to present a broader perspective on the evolution of the global business cycle. Specifically, it analyzes the behavior of confidence, uncertainty, and measures of global financial conditions that have recently attracted increasing attention in research and policy circles. Fourth, it presents a detailed analysis of global expansions and puts the current global expansion in context by comparing it with previous such episodes.

This study, like KT, employs global real GDP per capita to track movements in the global business cycle. This variable is a primary indicator of global well-being that takes into account variations in population growth rates over time and across countries.

> 1 Most of the earlier studies in the literature focused on the dependence of EMDEs on advanced economies (e.g., Currie and Vines 1988; Chui et al. 2002). Zarnowitz (1992) reviews earlier research programs on business cycle fluctuations across countries. In addition, there are studies that try to forecast global growth, for example, Cuba-Borda, Mechanick, and Raffo (2018); Ferrara and Marcilli (2019); Golinelli and Parigi (2014); and Rossiter (2010).

> 2 For details on these studies, see Kose and Yi (2006); di Giovanni and Levchenko (2010); di Giovanni, Levchenko, and Mejean (2018); and Diebold and Yilmaz (2015).

> 3 For details on this work, see Kose and Terrones (2015); Camacho and Martinez-Martin (2015); and Martínez-García, Grossman, and Mack (2015).

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