Romney has claimed that the President has mismanaged the recovery, and certainly the recovery has been slower than any of us would have liked. Let us, however, compare our recovery with that of some of the other industrial countries hit by the Bush Great Recession:
The GDP figures are in trillions of US dollars.
Country |
GDP '09 |
GDP '10 |
Ratio |
% growth |
Spain |
1.464 |
1.407 |
0.9611 |
-3.89 |
Italy |
2.121 |
2.061 |
0.9717 |
-2.83 |
France |
2.625 |
2.560 |
0.9752 |
-2.48 |
Germany |
3.299 |
3.280 |
0.9942 |
-0.58 |
UK |
2.171 |
2.262 |
1.0419 |
+4.19 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
USA |
14.048 |
14.587 |
1.0384 |
+3.84 |
The United States had a better 1st-year recovery than any of the major European countries except the United Kingdom. (The country we keep calling "England.") Even the UK had only about a third of a percentage point better recovery than we did.
These figures are from the World Bank.
I hesitated to give this URL. I would love to have more recent figures, and I suspect that there are other posters on dKos who could get them. I'm used to navigating US GDP figures, but the world figures are new to me. If you can get more recent figures, please post a diary using them and give a reference to that diary in a comment on this one. Even figures for the EU as a whole would help. The World Bank gives EU figures in some of its "national" tables, but not in this one.