The United States’ unusual recovery from pandemic recession
Podcast

The United States’ unusual recovery from pandemic recession

Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti and David Dollar
Brookings Institution, 2021

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Major nations are turning the economic corner from the coronavirus pandemic, albeit at different rates. The United States is well ahead of its developed-country peers, thanks to robust fiscal and monetary policies and strong private consumption, but all is not uniformly positive, as economists Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti and David Dollar explore in this instructive episode of the Brookings Institution podcast Dollar and Sense. 

Summary

The speed of recovery from the COVID-19 recession varies across the advanced economies.

Recovery rates, in terms of real GDP, differ among the United States, the European Union and Japan. America leads, with a higher GDP at the end of 2021 than in the last quarter of 2019, just prior to the onset of the pandemic. The euro area is close behind, but its heterogeneity makes for a mixed result. Japan lost its early lead and control of the virus, experiencing a slight downturn in 2021.

Another way to gauge the health of the advanced economies is by observing where they are at present, relative to how their economies would have progressed absent the coronavirus. On this score, the ...

About the Podcast

Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, as is David Dollar, who hosts the trade and economics podcast Dollar and Sense.

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