Between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the end of the Great Depression in the late 1930s, the Soviet Union saw the largest growth in its gross domestic product, growing by more than 70 percent between 1929 and 1937/8. The Great Depression began in 1929 in the United States, following the stock market crash in late October. The inter-connectedness of the global economy, particularly between North America and Europe, then came to the fore as the collapse of the U.S. economy exposed the instabilities of other industrialized countries. In contrast, the economic isolation of the Soviet Union and its detachment from the capitalist system meant that it was relatively shielded from these events. 1929-1932 The Soviet Union was one of just three countries listed that experienced GDP growth during the first three years of the Great Depression, with Bulgaria and Denmark being the other two. Bulgaria experienced the largest GDP growth over these three years, increasing by 27 percent, although it was also the only country to experience a decline in growth over the second period. The majority of other European countries saw their GDP growth fall in the depression's early years. However, none experienced the same level of decline as the United States, which dropped by 28 percent. 1932-1938 In the remaining years before the Second World War, all of the listed countries saw their GDP grow significantly, particularly Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Coincidentally, these were the three most powerful nations during the Second World War. This recovery was primarily driven by industrialization, and, again, the U.S., USSR, and Germany all experienced the highest level of industrial growth between 1932 and 1938.

On October 29, 1929, the U.S. experienced the most devastating stock market crash in it's history. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 set in motion the Great Depression, which lasted for twelve years and affected virtually all industrialized countries. In the United States, GDP fell to it's lowest recorded level of just 57 billion U.S dollars in 1933, before rising again shortly before the Second World War. After the war, GDP fluctuated, but it increased gradually until the Great Recession in 2008. Real GDP Real GDP allows us to compare GDP over time, by adjusting all figures for inflation. In this case, all numbers have been adjusted to the value of the US dollar in FY2012. While GDP rose every year between 1946 and 2008, when this is adjusted for inflation it can see that the real GDP dropped at least once in every decade except the 1960s and 2010s. The Great Recession Apart from the Great Depression, and immediately after WWII, there have been two times where both GDP and real GDP dropped together. The first was during the Great Recession, which lasted from December 2007 until June 2009 in the US, although its impact was felt for years after this. After the collapse of the financial sector in the US, the government famously bailed out some of the country's largest banking and lending institutions. Since recovery began in late 2009, US GDP has grown year-on-year, and reached 21.4 trillion dollars in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic and the associated lockdowns then saw GDP fall again, for the first time in a decade. As economic recovery from the pandemic has been compounded by supply chain issues, inflation, and rising global geopolitical instability, it remains to be seen what the future holds for the U.S. economy.

The Covid-19 pandemic saw growth fall by 2.2 percent, compared with an increase of 2.5 percent the year before. The last time the real GDP growth rates fell by a similar level was during the Great Recession in 2009, and the only other time since the Second World War where real GDP fell by more than one percent was in the early 1980s recession. The given records began following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, and GDP growth fluctuated greatly between the Great Depression and the 1950s, before growth became more consistent.

This website contains the replication files for "The Prelude and Global Impact of the Great Depression Evidence from a New Macroeconomic Dataset." Besides Stata and Matlab codes, it contains the underlying dataset of about 1150 macroeconomic time series for 28 countries. It can be used to replicate all results and robustness checks.

Graph and download economic data for Dates of U.S. recessions as inferred by GDP-based recession indicator (JHDUSRGDPBR) from Q4 1967 to Q4 2024 about recession indicators, GDP, and USA.

From the Summer of 2007 until the end of 2009 (at least), the world was gripped by a series of economic crises commonly known as the Global Financial Crisis (2007-2008) and the Great Recession (2008-2009). The financial crisis was triggered by the collapse of the U.S. housing market, which caused panic on Wall Street, the center of global finance in New York. Due to the outsized nature of the U.S. economy compared to other countries and particularly the centrality of U.S. finance for the world economy, the crisis spread quickly to other countries, affecting most regions across the globe. By 2009, global GDP growth was in negative territory, with international credit markets frozen, international trade contracting, and tens of millions of workers being made unemployed.

Global similarities, global differences

Since the 1980s, the world economy had entered a period of integration and globalization. This process particularly accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War (1947-1991). This was the period of the 'Washington Consensus', whereby the U.S. and international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF promoted policies of economic liberalization across the globe. This increasing interdependence and openness to the global economy meant that when the crisis hit in 2007, many countries experienced the same issues. This is particularly evident in the synchronization of the recessions in the most advanced economies of the G7. Nevertheless, the aggregate global GDP number masks the important regional differences which occurred during the recession. While the more advanced economies of North America, Western Europe, and Japan were all hit hard, along with countries who are reliant on them for trade or finance, large emerging economies such as India and China bucked this trend. In particular, China's huge fiscal stimulus in 2008-2009 likely did much to prevent the global economy from sliding further into a depression. In 2009, while the United States' GDP sank to -2.6 percent, China's GDP, as reported by national authorities, was almost 10 percent.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Venezuela expanded 8.54 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024 over the same quarter of the previous year. This dataset provides - Venezuela GDP Annual Growth Rate - actual values, historical data, forecast, chart, statistics, economic calendar and news.

The Question “Why unemployment?” is one of the most central topics of economic theory since the great depression. Unemployment remains one of the most important problems of economic policies in industrial countries. Unemployment has different causes and therefore also different countermeasures are required. “Together with the destruction of environment unemployment and inflation are in the focus of economic and political discussions on macroeconomic problems and are considered as the greatest challenges of economic policy. Depending on the level of unemployment there is a higher focus on inflation or on unemployment, if both are on an alarming level at the same time they are in the shot simultaneously. In anyway both issues need to be analyzed together because they are not independent from each other. Experiences from the recent years have shown that combating inflation leads to an increase in unemployment, at least temporarily but probably also permanently. The other way around; combating unemployment may under certain circumstances also lead to an increase in inflation… Unemployment and inflation are macroeconomic problems. The level of both undesirable developments is determined by the relations in the entire economy. Therefor it is necessary to use macroeconomic theory which deals the general economic context for the analysis. Both problems are enhanced by structural factors which also need to be analyzed. In contrast to microeconomic theory which focuses on different individual decision makers, in macroeconomic theory decision makers and decisions are summarized in macroeconomic aggregates. The common procedure is to summarize decision makers into aggregates like “private households”, “enterprises” and “the state” and the decision makers concerning the use of income into “private consumption”, “investments” and “public expenditure” (Kromphardt, Jürgen, 1998: Arbeitslosigkeit und Inflation (unemployment and inflation). 2., newly revised A. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, p. 17-18). Macroeconomic approaches on the explanation of unemployment and inflation are highly controversial in economic theory. Therefore the author starts with the attempt to present different explanations for unemployment and inflation from different macroeconomic positions. There are different unemployment: classical unemployment (reason: real wages to high), Keynesian unemployment (reason: demand for goods to low), unemployment due to a lack of working places (reason: capital stock to low). These positions give conflicting explanations and recommendations because they are based on different perceptions of the starting position. Therefor the author confronts central positions with empirical data on the macro level with the following restriction: “It is impossible to prove theories as correct (to verify). This is a reason for the fact that macroeconomic controversies do not come to a conclusion but are continued in a modified way. Furthermore economic statements in this field always affect social and political interests as all economic policies favor or put as a disadvantage interests of distinct social groups in a different way.“ (Kromphardt, a.a.O., S. 20).

Data tables in HISTAT (1) Development of employment: Presented by the development of annual average unemployment rates and the balance of labor force of the institute for labor market and occupation research (IAB, Nuremberg) after the domestic concept(employment with Germany as the place of work) For characterizing the overall economic developments, those values are used which play an important role in the reports of the German central bank: (2) Inflation: Rate of differences in the price index for costs of living compared to the previous year (3) Currency reserves of German federal banks and the German central bank: measure for foreign economic situation and the payment balance of the central bank (4) Development of economic growth: Presented by the nominal and real growth rate of the GDP (5) Inflation rate of the GDP, money supply, growth rate of the price index of the GDP (6) Labor productivity (= GDP per employee, domestic concept) (7) Real wage per employee (8) Exchange rate: DM/$ (monthly averages) (9) Growth of DGP, productivity, economically active population, real incomes, unemployment rate and adjusted wages (10) Time series connected with labor demand (11) GDP, labor volume, employees, working hours and labor productivity (12) Employee compensation, wages and ...

In 1938, the year before the Second World War, the United States had, by far, the largest economy in the world in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). The five Allied Great Powers that emerged victorious from the war, along with the three Axis Tripartite Pact countries that were ultimately defeated made up the eight largest independent economies in 1938.

When values are converted into 1990 international dollars, the U.S. GDP was over 800 billion dollars in 1938, which was more than double that of the second largest economy, the Soviet Union. Even the combined economies of the UK, its dominions, and colonies had a value of just over 680 billion 1990 dollars, showing that the United States had established itself as the world's leading economy during the interwar period (despite the Great Depression).

Interestingly, the British and Dutch colonies had larger combined GDPs than their respective metropoles, which was a key motivator for the Japanese invasion of these territories in East Asia during the war. Trade with neutral and non-belligerent countries also contributed greatly to the economic development of Allied and Axis powers throughout the war; for example, natural resources from Latin America were essential to the American war effort, while German manufacturing was often dependent on Swedish iron supplies.

During the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the advanced economies of the G7 experienced a period of acute financial crises, downturns in the non-financial economy, and political instability. The governments of these countries in many cases stepped in to backstop their financial sectors and to try to stimulate their economies. The scale of these interventions was large by historical standards, with observers making comparisons to the measures of the New Deal which the U.S. undertook in the 1930s to end the Great Depression.

The bailouts of financial institutions and stimulus packages caused the government debt ratios of the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan in particular to rise sharply. The UK's government debt ratio almost doubled due to the bailouts of Northern Rock and Royal Bank of Scotland. On the other hand, the increases in government debt in the Eurozone were more measured, due to the comparative absence of stimulus spending in these countries. They would later be hit hard during the Eurozone crisis of the 2010s, when bank lending to the periphery of the Eurozone (Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Greece in particular) would trigger a sovereign debt crisis. The Canadian government, led by a Conservative premier, engaged in some fiscal stimulus to support its economy, but these packages were small in comparison to that in most other of the G7 countries.

During the period beginning roughly in the mid-1980s until the Global Financial Crisis (2007-2008), the U.S. economy experienced a time of relative economic calm, with low inflation and consistent GDP growth. Compared with the turbulent economic era which had preceded it in the 1970s and the early 1980s, the lack of extreme fluctuations in the business cycle led some commentators to suggest that macroeconomic issues such as high inflation, long-term unemployment and financial crises were a thing of the past. Indeed, the President of the American Economic Association, Professor Robert Lucas, famously proclaimed in 2003 that "central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes". Ben Bernanke, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics recipient, coined the term 'the Great Moderation' to describe this era of newfound economic confidence. The era came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the GFC in the Summer of 2007, as the U.S. financial system began to crash due to a downturn in the real estate market.

Causes of the Great Moderation, and its downfall

A number of factors have been cited as contributing to the Great Moderation including central bank monetary policies, the shift from manufacturing to services in the economy, improvements in information technology and management practices, as well as reduced energy prices. The period coincided with the term of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan (1987-2006), famous for the 'Greenspan put', a policy which meant that the Fed would proactively address downturns in the stock market using its monetary policy tools. These economic factors came to prominence at the same time as the end of the Cold War (1947-1991), with the U.S. attaining a new level of hegemony in global politics, as its main geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union, no longer existed. During the Great Moderation, the U.S. experienced a recession twice, between July 1990 and March 1991, and again from March 2001 tom November 2001, however, these relatively short recessions did not knock the U.S. off its growth path. The build up of household and corporate debt over the early 2000s eventually led to the Global Financial Crisis, as the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble in 2007 reverberated across the financial system, with a subsequent credit freeze and mass defaults.

In the build up to the Second World War, the United States was the major power with the highest gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world. In 1938, the United States also had the highest overall GDP in the world, and by a significant margin, however differences in GDP per person were much smaller. Switzerland In terms of countries that played a notable economic role in the war, the neutral country of Switzerland had the highest GDP per capita in the world. A large part of this was due to the strength of Switzerland's financial system. Most major currencies abandoned the gold standard early in the Great Depression, however the Swiss Franc remained tied to it until late 1936. This meant that it was the most stable, freely convertible currency available as the world recovered from the Depression, and other major powers of the time sold large amounts of gold to Swiss banks in order to trade internationally. Switzerland was eventually surrounded on all sides by Axis territories and lived under the constant threat of invasion in the war's early years, however Swiss strategic military planning and economic leverage made an invasion potentially more expensive than it was worth. Switzerland maintained its neutrality throughout the war, trading with both sides, although its financial involvement in the Holocaust remains a point of controversy. Why look at GDP per capita? While overall GDP is a stronger indicator of a state's ability to fund its war effort, GDP per capita is more useful in giving context to a country's economic power in relation to its size and providing an insight into living standards and wealth distribution across societies. For example, Germany and the USSR had fairly similar GDPs in 1938, whereas Germany's per capita GDP was more than double that of the Soviet Union. Germany was much more industrialized and technologically advanced than the USSR, and its citizens generally had a greater quality of life. However these factors did not guarantee victory - the fact that the Soviet Union could better withstand the war of attrition and call upon its larger population to replenish its forces greatly contributed to its eventual victory over Germany in 1945.

The gross domestic product (GDP) of Finland was 273 billion euros in 2023, an increase of around 7.2 billion euros compared with the previous year. Finland's GDP showed an upward trend from the early 2000’s until 2009, when the economy was strongly hit by the global financial crisis. Thereafter, the Finnish economy stagnated, and the GDP slowly resumed its growth. However, after a three-year recession between 2012 and 2014, the GDP growth rates remained relatively weak. Slow recovery after the financial crisis As a small open economy, Finland was severely affected by the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. While all euro-countries fell into recession in the early stages of the crisis, the recovery of the Finnish economy has been tardy, remaining below the EU average. Finland’s GDP drop in 2009 was the worst since the ‘great depression’ of the early 1990’s, from which the Finnish economy recovered relatively fast because of the strong Nokia-led ICT industry. By 2009, the backbones of Finnish economy, forest and ICT industry, had started to encounter difficulties in foreign trade. This declining value of foreign trade coupled with weaker international business conditions resulted in economic stagnation. Challenging outlook According to economic forecasts, the Finnish economy is expected to experience a slow growth rate of the GDP in the upcoming years. In recent years, the economic growth has been stronger, although Finland is still catching up to other similar EU countries in productivity, household income, and employment rate. Traditionally, the country’s strengths have been high-level education and skilled workforce, openness to investments, as well as stable institutions. However, the population is ageing and the public debt has risen almost 30 percent between 2008 and 2019. The future outlook is further challenged by the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Over the first half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union's GDP per capita rose from 1,218 U.S. dollars to 2,8334 U.S. dollars. There was a slight decrease between 1913 and 1929 due to the devastation caused by the First World War and Russian Revolution and the transition to a communist government and socialist economic structure. However, GDP per capita grew over the following three intervals, and the Soviet Union's relative isolation in the 1920s and 1930s meant that it was relatively untouched by the Great Depression in the 1930s. At the end of the recovery period after the Second World War, in 1950, GDP per capita had already exceeded pre-war levels by a significant margin, and the Soviet Union emerged as one of the two global superpowers, alongside the United States.

Robust least squares regression for ln(GDP).

In the first half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union's GDP per capita rose from roughly one-third of Western Europe's GDP per capita in 1900 to one-half of its rate in 1950. Although it grew gradually between the given intervals, it did drop between 1913 and 1929 due to the devastation caused by the First World War and Russian Revolution. However, this year also marked the beginning of the Great Depression, which caused a significant economic downturn across Western Europe while being relatively unfelt in the Soviet Union.

The early-20th century is often considered the most destructive period in European history, with the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s being defined by various aspects including recovery from the First World War, as well as fluctuating political and economic stability. In particular, the onset of the Great Depression in the U.S. created a ripple effect that was felt across the globe, especially in Europe. During this time, all major currencies were connected via the gold standard; however, several European countries had suspended the gold standard to print additional money during the First World War, and conditions had not re-stabilized by the onset of the Great Depression in the U.S. - the given countries would all abandon the gold standard by the outbreak of war in 1939. Germany Additionally, American investors withdrew much of their capital from Europe in the wake of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, and the U.S. government ceased all loans to Germany and demanded advanced repayments. The German economy had already collapsed in the early-1920s, and it became dependent on American loans to stabilize its economy and meet its reparation payments - this move by the American government caused a German economic collapse once more, sending the economy into a downward spiral. Regional differences For France, its industrial output dropped in the wake of the Great Depression, and it would not reach these levels again until after the Second World War. In contrast, the Soviet Union was largely shielded from the Great Depression, and its industrial output grew significantly in the build-up to WWII (albeit from a much less-developed starting point). For the other three countries listed, output would not reach pre-Depression levels until at least 1934.

When compared with respective GDP per capita in 1900, Western Europe saw the most significant change between 1870 and 1950, increasing steadily from 68 percent to 166 percent throughout this period. It is important to note that Western Europe's GDP per capita in 1900 was roughly double that of the other two regions, at 3,092 FY1990 U.S. dollars, compared with 1,572 FY1990 U.S. dollars in Southern Europe and 1,373 FY1990 U.S. dollars in Central and Eastern Europe.

In terms of GDP per capita growth, Southern Europe's rate gradually increased to 137 percent by 1929, before the Great Depression and Second World War saw it fall to 129 percent in 1950. In comparison, the political and economic instability of the interwar period saw GDP per capita fall to a similar level to its 1900 figure in Central and Eastern Europe by 1929, before it increased again over the subsequent two decades.

In the past four centuries, the population of the United States has grown from a recorded 350 people around the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1610, to an estimated 331 million people in 2020. The pre-colonization populations of the indigenous peoples of the Americas have proven difficult for historians to estimate, as their numbers decreased rapidly following the introduction of European diseases (namely smallpox, plague and influenza). Native Americans were also omitted from most censuses conducted before the twentieth century, therefore the actual population of what we now know as the United States would have been much higher than the official census data from before 1800, but it is unclear by how much. Population growth in the colonies throughout the eighteenth century has primarily been attributed to migration from the British Isles and the Transatlantic slave trade; however it is also difficult to assert the ethnic-makeup of the population in these years as accurate migration records were not kept until after the 1820s, at which point the importation of slaves had also been illegalized. Nineteenth century In the year 1800, it is estimated that the population across the present-day United States was around six million people, with the population in the 16 admitted states numbering at 5.3 million. Migration to the United States began to happen on a large scale in the mid-nineteenth century, with the first major waves coming from Ireland, Britain and Germany. In some aspects, this wave of mass migration balanced out the demographic impacts of the American Civil War, which was the deadliest war in U.S. history with approximately 620 thousand fatalities between 1861 and 1865. The civil war also resulted in the emancipation of around four million slaves across the south; many of whose ancestors would take part in the Great Northern Migration in the early 1900s, which saw around six million black Americans migrate away from the south in one of the largest demographic shifts in U.S. history. By the end of the nineteenth century, improvements in transport technology and increasing economic opportunities saw migration to the United States increase further, particularly from southern and Eastern Europe, and in the first decade of the 1900s the number of migrants to the U.S. exceeded one million people in some years. Twentieth and twenty-first century The U.S. population has grown steadily throughout the past 120 years, reaching one hundred million in the 1910s, two hundred million in the 1960s, and three hundred million in 2007. In the past century, the U.S. established itself as a global superpower, with the world's largest economy (by nominal GDP) and most powerful military. Involvement in foreign wars has resulted in over 620,000 further U.S. fatalities since the Civil War, and migration fell drastically during the World Wars and Great Depression; however the population continuously grew in these years as the total fertility rate remained above two births per woman, and life expectancy increased (except during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918).

Since the Second World War, Latin America has replaced Europe as the most common point of origin for migrants, with Hispanic populations growing rapidly across the south and border states. Because of this, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites, which has been the most dominant ethnicity in the U.S. since records began, has dropped more rapidly in recent decades. Ethnic minorities also have a much higher birth rate than non-Hispanic whites, further contributing to this decline, and the share of non-Hispanic whites is expected to fall below fifty percent of the U.S. population by the mid-2000s. In 2020, the United States has the third-largest population in the world (after China and India), and the population is expected to reach four hundred million in the 2050s.

The statistic shows the total population of Poland from 2020 to 2024, with projections up until 2030. In 2024, the total population of Poland amounted to around 36.62 million inhabitants. Population and economy of Poland Poland is the sixth most populated country in the EU, and the ninth most populated one in Europe. After experiencing a minor decline in population from the mid to late 2000s, Poland’s populace has gradually risen annually. Based on current trends, it is estimated that Poland will suffer a population decrease of roughly 4 million in 2050, an estimate that is highly plausible due to the ongoing financial crisis in Europe. A reason for the country’s slow but certain growth in population could be its economic upturn that has seen momentous improvements over the past decade. Due to industrialization during Russian-ruled Congress Poland as well as the Great Depression, Poland suffered from high amounts of unemployment. However, demand for jobs dramatically increased during the mid 21st century, causing unemployment to plummet. Interestingly, Poland is one of the few countries that reported an unemployment rate which was lower than during the years prior to the global financial crisis. A further indication of economic upturn is evident in the country’s gross domestic product, which is primarily an indicator of economic strength and production in a country. Poland’s GDP trend coincides with its unemployment rate, having doubled in value and maintained a higher GDP compared to the years prior to the financial crisis of 2008.