Word: nber
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...NBER has classified five post-World War II business contractions as recessions. No single standard determines that judgment, but the five drops do have some common denominators. Each lasted at least nine months, during which real G.N.P. fell at least 1.5% and industrial production dropped a minimum of 8.1%. Also, the jobless rate rose at least 2.3 percentage points, to 6.1 % or more, and employment declined in more than 80% of the 30 major non-farm industries that NBER statisticians watch closely...
...chief Presidential Economic Adviser Paul McCracken puts it, "The word itself is not an unambiguously precise term." There is really only one reliable definition: if experts of the National Bureau of Economic Research decide to call a business decline a recession, so shall it be known. But the NBER only identifies recessions long after they have begun, and by a complex process that yields no hard and fast criteria. The behavior of gross national product, industrial production, employment, personal income and many other statistics are matched against their performance in past periods designated as recessions, and NBER analysts decide...
Many economists have adopted as an informal definition of recession a decline in real gross national product-that is, G.N.P. minus the effect of inflation-in two successive quarters. Such a decline has never occurred except during a cycle that the NBER calls a recession. Last week McCracken dismissed the simple definition as "nonsense." Trying to frame a standard so exact, he said, is as "pointless" as trying to determine "the exact minimum number of whiskers that qualify to be called a beard...