Sometimes just looking at the headline figure is not the best way to judge a country’s performance in times of crisis.
As we measure countries' performance since the beginning of the global financial crisis we try to look for patterns that explain differences in behaviour and lessons on how to handle the next major downturn. When doing that comparison, however, we sometimes forget that looking at GDP growth does not always give us all the information we need to understand cross-country variation in performance due to demographic, labour market and productivity factors. While these factors might be correlated over time, this is not always the case.
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