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.

During the "Golden Age of Capitalism", from 1950 to 1973, GDP grew by annual averages of just under five percent in Western Europe*, four percent in the U.S., and ten percent in Japan. This period of prosperity came to an end with the recession of 1973-1975, however GDP growth rates did not return to their previous levels when the recession ended, as growth was fairly sporadic in the 1970s and then much slower throughout the 1980s. From 1973 to 1987, GDP grew annually at just two fifth of the Golden Age's rate in Europe and Japan, while the U.S.' annual rates were somewhat closer.

One major difference between the two given periods was that the U.S. was the dominant and most influential economy of all developed (non-communist) countries in the 1950s and 1960s, however, the 1970s and 1980s saw Japan and the European Communities (led by West Germany and France) emerge as major economic powers in their own right. While the U.S. remained the most powerful country in the world, other developed nations became more economically autonomous, and began asserting their own influence internationally.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United States expanded 2 percent in the first quarter of 2025 over the same quarter of the previous year. This dataset provides the latest reported value for - United States GDP Annual Growth Rate - plus previous releases, historical high and low, short-term forecast and long-term prediction, economic calendar, survey consensus and news.

View economic output, reported as the nominal value of all new goods and services produced by labor and property located in the U.S.

U.S. gdp growth rate for 2023 was 2.89%, a 0.38% increase from 2022.

<ul style='margin-top:20px;'>

<li>U.S. gdp growth rate for 2022 was <strong>2.51%</strong>, a <strong>3.54% decline</strong> from 2021.</li>
<li>U.S. gdp growth rate for 2021 was <strong>6.06%</strong>, a <strong>8.22% increase</strong> from 2020.</li>
<li>U.S. gdp growth rate for 2020 was <strong>-2.16%</strong>, a <strong>4.75% decline</strong> from 2019.</li>
</ul>Annual percentage growth rate of GDP at market prices based on constant local currency. Aggregates are based on constant 2010 U.S. dollars. GDP is the sum of gross value added by all resident producers in the economy plus any product taxes and minus any subsidies not included in the value of the products. It is calculated without making deductions for depreciation of fabricated assets or for depletion and degradation of natural resources.

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.

In 1950, GDP per capita in Western Europe (29 countries) was just 48 percent of GDP per capita in the U.S. The post-war economic boom from 1950 to 1973 was the most prosperous period in Western Europe's history, and GDP per capita more than doubled in this period, reaching 69 percent of the U.S.' rate. Due to several economic crises in Europe in the following decades, growth rates in Western Europe remained relatively stable. Still, they did not reach the same heights as seen during the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism.

In contrast, the U.S. had been harder hit than Western Europe by the economic difficulties of the 1970s and 1980s, but the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 coincided with one of the most successful decades in U.S. history, with the economy thriving in the 1990s. For Western Europe, the fall of communism had a knock-on effect that limited growth in the early 1990s, although GDP per capita compared to the U.S. was fairly similar to 1973's rate (albeit lower) at 66 percent.

Graph and download economic data for Nominal Gross Domestic Product for United States (NGDPNSAXDCUSQ) from Q1 1950 to Q1 2025 about GDP and USA.

Key information about United States Real GDP Growth

• The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in United States expanded 1.6 % YoY in Mar 2023, following a growth of 0.9 % in the previous quarter.
• Real GDP Growth YoY data in US is updated quarterly, available from Mar 1948 to Mar 2023, with an average rate of 3.0 %.
• The data reached an all-time high of 13.4 % in Dec 1950 and a record low of -8.4 % in Jun 2020.

• In the latest reports, Nominal GDP of US reached 6,621.6 USD bn in Mar 2023.
• Its GDP deflator (implicit price deflator) increased 5.4 % in Mar 2023.
• GDP Per Capita in US reached 59,484.0 USD in Dec 2017.
• Its Gross Savings Rate was measured at 15.9 % in Mar 2023.
• For Nominal GDP contributions, Investment accounted for 20.7 % in Mar 2023.
• Public Consumption accounted for 14.1 % in Mar 2023.
• Private Consumption accounted for 67.9 % in Mar 2023.

This dataset contains replication files for "The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940" by Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang. For more information, see https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/the-fading-american-dream/. A summary of the related publication follows. One of the defining features of the “American Dream” is the ideal that children have a higher standard of living than their parents. We assess whether the U.S. is living up to this ideal by estimating rates of “absolute income mobility” – the fraction of children who earn more than their parents – since 1940. We measure absolute mobility by comparing children’s household incomes at age 30 (adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index) with their parents’ household incomes at age 30. We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Absolute income mobility has fallen across the entire income distribution, with the largest declines for families in the middle class. These findings are unaffected by using alternative price indices to adjust for inflation, accounting for taxes and transfers, measuring income at later ages, and adjusting for changes in household size. Absolute mobility fell in all 50 states, although the rate of decline varied, with the largest declines concentrated in states in the industrial Midwest, such as Michigan and Illinois. The decline in absolute mobility is especially steep – from 95% for children born in 1940 to 41% for children born in 1984 – when we compare the sons’ earnings to their fathers’ earnings. Why have rates of upward income mobility fallen so sharply over the past half-century? There have been two important trends that have affected the incomes of children born in the 1980s relative to those born in the 1940s and 1950s: lower Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates and greater inequality in the distribution of growth. We find that most of the decline in absolute mobility is driven by the more unequal distribution of economic growth rather than the slowdown in aggregate growth rates. When we simulate an economy that restores GDP growth to the levels experienced in the 1940s and 1950s but distributes that growth across income groups as it is distributed today, absolute mobility only increases to 62%. In contrast, maintaining GDP at its current level but distributing it more broadly across income groups – at it was distributed for children born in the 1940s – would increase absolute mobility to 80%, thereby reversing more than two-thirds of the decline in absolute mobility. These findings show that higher growth rates alone are insufficient to restore absolute mobility to the levels experienced in mid-century America. Under the current distribution of GDP, we would need real GDP growth rates above 6% per year to return to rates of absolute mobility in the 1940s. Intuitively, because a large fraction of GDP goes to a small fraction of high-income households today, higher GDP growth does not substantially increase the number of children who earn more than their parents. Of course, this does not mean that GDP growth does not matter: changing the distribution of growth naturally has smaller effects on absolute mobility when there is very little growth to be distributed. The key point is that increasing absolute mobility substantially would require more broad-based economic growth. We conclude that absolute mobility has declined sharply in America over the past half-century primarily because of the growth in inequality. If one wants to revive the “American Dream” of high rates of absolute mobility, one must have an interest in growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution.

Historical chart and dataset showing U.S. GDP by year from 1960 to 2023.

Graph and download economic data for Real gross domestic product per capita (A939RX0Q048SBEA) from Q1 1947 to Q1 2025 about per capita, real, GDP, and USA.

The 1973-1975 recession marked the end of a remarkably prosperous period for developed economies. Apart from the United States, who experienced a brief recession in 1969-70, the other nations had enjoyed a period of uninterrupted growth in the 25 years leading up to this event. Japan in particular had the fastest growth of any major economy. This ended, however, following the 1973 oil crisis, which saw the member states of the OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) place an embargo on the nations who supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, particularly the U.S., who supplied arms to Israel. As a result, oil prices quadrupled in some periods; the U.S. and most of its major economic partners then went into recession due to their dependency on oil imports. Additional factors exacerbated the effects of the recession in each country, such as the miners' strike in the United Kingdom, or Nixon's unstable economic policies in the early 1970s. It was not until 1976 when the major OECD economies would come out of their recession, although real GDP growth rates would not return to the consistent highs experienced in the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, while GDP growth resumed within a few years, inflation rates and unemployment rates generally remained higher going into the 1980s.

Abstract (en): This research focuses on the longer-term monetary relationships in historical data. Charts describing the 10-year average growth rates in the M2 monetary aggregate, nominal GDP, real GDP, and inflation are used to show that there is a consistent longer-term correlation between M2 growth, nominal GDP growth, and inflation but not between such nominal variables and real GDP growth. The data reveal extremely long cycles in monetary growth and inflation, the most recent of which was the strong upward trend in M2 growth, nominal GDP growth, and inflation during the 1960s and 1970s, and the strong downward trend since then. Data going back to the 19th century show that the most recent inflation/disinflation cycle is a repetition of earlier long monetary growth and inflation cycles in the United States historical record. Also discussed is a measure of bond market inflation credibility, defined as the difference between averages in long-term bond rates and real GDP growth. By this measure, inflation credibility hovered close to zero during the 1950s and early 1960s, but then rose to a peak of about 10 percent in the early 1980s. During the 1990s, the bond market has yet to restore the low inflation credibility that existed before inflation turned up during the 1960s. The conclusion is that the risks of starting another costly inflation/disinflation cycle could be avoided by monitoring monetary growth and maintaining a sufficiently tight policy to keep inflation low. An environment of credible price stability would allow the economy to function unfettered by inflationary distortions, which is all that can reasonably be expected of monetary policy, and is precisely what should be expected. (1) The file submitted is the data file 9811WD.DAT. (2) These data are part of ICPSR's Publication-Related Archive and are distributed exactly as they arrived from the data depositor. ICPSR has not checked or processed this material. Users should consult the investigator(s) if further information is desired.

The current growing interest in the growth of the Western European economies between the end of World War II and the first oil crisis of 1973 is primarily due to the end of the Cold War and the subsequent demand for solutions for the economic problems of Central and Eastern European transition countries. It was and is discussed to what extent we could learn from the successful rebuilding of the Western European economies. In this context one area of special interest is the reconstruction of West Germany, closely accompanied by the principle of the social market economy. The recollection of this principle, and the call for a new Marshall Plan imply the idea that the Western European post-war boom in essence can be traced to a successful economic policy. It is shown how this assumption can stand up to a theoretical and empirical analysis. Using the new growth theory and the cointegration analysis both national (eg social market economy and Planification (i.e. macroeconomic framework development planning)) and international explanations (eg the Marshall Plan) of the so called ‘golden age’ are examined. It turns out that the impact of economic policies on economic growth must be put into perspective. In contrast, the importance of the different economic conditions of the countries for the explication of their growth process is underlined.

Variables, inter alia: - Investment behavior of industry - Production and Export industry - Exchange Rates - Structure of the economies

Data focus: Foreign trade structure, external value (foreign wholesale prices), export volume, industrial production, capital stock, long-term development (income, investment rates, openness, exchange rates), patents (patent applications in Germany, France).

List of tables in the database HISTAT ZA: - Investment rates in four European countries (1880-1995) - Net fixed assets of the industry in Germany (1950-1968) - Sectoral Gross capital expenditures in Germany (1960-1976) - Sectoral Gross investment in France (1949-1965) - Export volume index of France and the Federal Republic of Germany (1950-1973) - Export volume in millions of current U.S. dollars (1951-1990) - Weighted exchange rate index in indirect rate (1950-1973) - Index of industrial production in Europe and North America (1950-1973) - Construction and equipment investment in Germany (1950-1968) - Investment rates in four European countries (1880-1995) - Sectoral gross and net capital stock in France (1950-1970) - Sectoral gross and net capital stock, investment in France (1950-1969) - Percentage of the French colonies in the French total exports (1950-1973) - Openness of four European economies (1880-1994) - Annual patent applications in the United States (1963-1995) - Real per capita income in Europe and the United States (1870-1992) - Regional structure of the French export value (1896-1973) - French sector gross investment (1960-1976) - Exchange rates in four European countries (1891-1995)

Territory of investigation: Germany, France, further OECD-states.

Sources: Publications of the official French and German statistics, publications of the OECD, USA and further states; scientific journals.

The United States recorded a trade deficit of 71.52 USD Billion in May of 2025. This dataset provides the latest reported value for - United States Balance of Trade - plus previous releases, historical high and low, short-term forecast and long-term prediction, economic calendar, survey consensus and news.

World gdp growth rate for 2023 was 2.83%, a 0.4% decline from 2022.

<ul style='margin-top:20px;'>

<li>World gdp growth rate for 2022 was <strong>3.24%</strong>, a <strong>3.11% decline</strong> from 2021.</li>
<li>World gdp growth rate for 2021 was <strong>6.35%</strong>, a <strong>9.23% increase</strong> from 2020.</li>
<li>World gdp growth rate for 2020 was <strong>-2.88%</strong>, a <strong>5.55% decline</strong> from 2019.</li>
</ul>Annual percentage growth rate of GDP at market prices based on constant local currency. Aggregates are based on constant 2010 U.S. dollars. GDP is the sum of gross value added by all resident producers in the economy plus any product taxes and minus any subsidies not included in the value of the products. It is calculated without making deductions for depreciation of fabricated assets or for depletion and degradation of natural resources.

The United States recorded a Government Debt to GDP of 124.30 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product in 2024. This dataset provides - United States Government Debt To GDP - actual values, historical data, forecast, chart, statistics, economic calendar and news.

China gdp growth rate for 2023 was 5.20%, a 2.21% increase from 2022.

<ul style='margin-top:20px;'>

<li>China gdp growth rate for 2022 was <strong>2.99%</strong>, a <strong>5.46% decline</strong> from 2021.</li>
<li>China gdp growth rate for 2021 was <strong>8.45%</strong>, a <strong>6.21% increase</strong> from 2020.</li>
<li>China gdp growth rate for 2020 was <strong>2.24%</strong>, a <strong>3.71% decline</strong> from 2019.</li>
</ul>Annual percentage growth rate of GDP at market prices based on constant local currency. Aggregates are based on constant 2010 U.S. dollars. GDP is the sum of gross value added by all resident producers in the economy plus any product taxes and minus any subsidies not included in the value of the products. It is calculated without making deductions for depreciation of fabricated assets or for depletion and degradation of natural resources.

In 1950, labor productivity in the given Southern and Eastern European countries was approximately 23 percent of labor productivity in the United States. At the end of the so-called "Golden Age" in Europe, a period of extreme economic growth between the early 1950s and the Recession of 1973-1975, productivity had increased to 44 percent of the U.S. rate in the Southern European countries. In contrast, it had only increased to 29 percent in the Eastern Bloc countries. In the 1990s, as the Eastern European countries transitioned from socialist to market-based economies, productivity compared to the U.S. fell in relation to 1973's rates. However, this was not the case in Southern Europe; in Spain, for example, productivity was almost 70 percent of the U.S.' rate in the 1990s.

By comparison, labor productivity was between 40 and 60 percent of the U.S.' rate across the advanced Western European countries in 1950. By the end of the century, most Western European nations, especially France, Germany, and the Netherlands, had matched labor productivity in the U.S. in terms of GDP per hour worked.