Irish GDP since 2009 has not yet recovered more than half of the ground it lost between the peak of late-2007 and the bottom two years later.

n December 2012, the Spanish Economic Association created the Spanish Business Cycle Dating Committee.

NBER defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators” (NBER 2008).

In other words, this desire to keep a chronology of economic turning points—peaks and troughs of economic activity, and therefore implicitly expansions and recessions—reflects the notion that there are fundamental differences between these two phases of the economic cycle.

If the criteria for determining recessions in European countries were similar to those used in the United States, the Great Recession would probably not have been declared over in 2009 in the first place.

The committee commonly releases its determinations of cyclical turning points with more than a year’s delay, although sometimes committee members make public statements about recession dates in advance of formal statements.Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion.” In a popular definition used by many investors and the press, a recession is determined by a negative economic growth rate for two or more consecutive quarters.This rule of thumb was first proposed in 1974 by the Commissioner of the U. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Julius Shiskin, in an article in the New York Times.Annual growth rates for GDP and trade were filtered using the Hodrick-Prescott method and the results were correlated through the Pearson approach to obtain the degree of similarity between countries with respect to their economic fluctuations.The results highlight a stronger degree of synchronization during recessions, while in time of economic expansion there are 2 well-defined macro cycles corresponding to each continent: Europe, North America and the emergent Asian cycle.And since GDP growth as high as 2% is sometimes observed during recessions, the dating of business cycles is not simply a mindless, mechanical accounting exercise based on when GDP growth is negative.The NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee was formed in 1978 to establish a historical chronology of business cycle turning points.