to fall below 1.1 percent to register a contraction in per capita GDP given the population growth in 2019, but, of course, population growth is time variant with substantial changes from one decade to another.<sup>13</sup> The judgmental method is applied at the global level by looking at movements in several indicators of global activity—real GDP per capita, industrial production, trade, capital flows, oil consumption, and employment. This method also results in the same four dates as the years of global recessions: most of these indicators point to an obvious contraction in global economic activity in these years, after a peak in the preceding year. The behavior of the indicators during the global recessions is discussed below.

The turning points of the global business cycle identified using the quarterly data are consistent with those from the annual data series. The statistical approach identifies four global recessions in the quarterly series since 1960: 1974:1-1975:1, 1981:4-1982:4, 1990:41991:1, and 2008:3-2009:1 (Figure 6; Table 1). With the quarterly data, the average duration of global recessions was slightly less than one year. In addition to these four recession episodes, global per capita output contracted in 1970:4 (-0.7 percent), 1980:2 (- 4.8 percent), 1981:2 (-0.3 percent), 1998:1 (-0.2 percent), and 2001:3 (-0.5 percent).<sup>14</sup> These contractions lasted for only a quarter without translating into global recessions. However, some of these short-lived global contractions were associated with recessions in major economies that took place ahead of global recessions (1982) or coincided with global downturns (1998 and 2001), as discussed below.<sup>15</sup> Global downturns. In addition to the four global recessions, the global economy experienced low growth in 1958, 1998, 2001, and 2012: in these four years, the global economy registered its lowest growth rates of the past seven decades, except for the years of global recession and the two years before and after each of them.<sup>16</sup> World output per capita grew by slightly less than 1 percent a year, on average, over these four downturns (Table 2). These downturns fall short of qualifying as global recessions because world real GDP per capita did not contract and there was no broad-based weakness in multiple indicators of global activity.

In 1958 , global growth was weak because of low growth or outright recessions in several major economies, including the United States and some European economies (Federal

> 13 Global population growth has slowed by 0.7 percentage point since the 1950s to 1.2 percent a year over 2010-19. 14 Global quarterly per capita growth is measured as the difference between quarter-on-quarter annualized growth of seasonally-adjusted real GDP, aggregated with market weights, and annual population growth (Appendix 2). 15 The United States experienced a recession in 1969:4-1970:4 with per capita GDP contracting by more than 5 percent in 1970:4. This also coincided with a recession in Japan (with per capita growth dropped to negative 2.7 percent). Per capita output in the United States contracted by around 9 percent in 1980:2 while a number of advanced economies also experienced contractions, including Japan (with a contraction in per capita output by around 4 percent) and the United Kingdom (with a decline by around 8 percent). Over 1960-2019, world per capita output growth was close to but above zero in several quarters. These were due to contractions in some major economies, for example in 1960:4 (contraction in the United States with expansions in other major economies); 1963:1 (contractions in France, Germany, and the Netherlands); 1987:1 (Germany); and 1989:2 (Japan).

> 16 The statistical method identifies the local minimum in each episode. There were years in which global growth was lower than in the years of global downturns, but those years were always within two years before or after these recession and downturn episodes (e.g., 1980).

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