As a result of the restrictive measures prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, economic output in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 37 member states dropped by 9.8 percent in the second quarter of the year compared with the first quarter, the OECD writes in its quarterly GDP report released on Aug. 26.
“Following the introduction of COVID-19 containment measures across the world since March 2020, real gross domestic product (GDP) in the OECD area showed an unprecedented fall, by (minus) 9.8%, in the second quarter of 2020, according to provisional estimates,” the report notes. “This is the largest drop ever recorded for the OECD area, significantly larger than the (minus) 2.3% recorded in the first quarter of 2009, at the height of the financial crisis.”
The OECD’s 37 member states account for 62.2 percent of the global GDP ($49.6 trillion). The report highlighted that the biggest declines had been registered in the United Kingdom (-20.4 percent), followed by France (-13.8) and Italy (-12). Europe’s largest economy, the German one contracted by 9.7 percent, almost the same as the United States (-9.5).
Japan fared relatively better, having had only suffered a 7.8 percent setback.
In the eurozone, the quarter-on-quarter decline was 12.1 percent after a 3.6 percent fall in the first quarter while in the European Union the decline accelerated to 11.7 percent from 3.2 percent.
Among the Visegrád countries, Hungary suffered the largest setback (-14.5 percent), followed by Poland (-8.9), the Czech Republic (-8.4) and Slovakia (-8.3).
In an also unprecedented move, the report also contains a footnote saying that “many statistical agencies are facing unprecedented collection, compilation and methodological challenges” and as a result “the statistics (…) may be subject to larger, and more frequent, than normal revisions.”
