How Russia And The United States Have Fared Since The Great Recession

Spurred in part by a solid February jobs number, there has been a lot of talk recently about how the United States has finally recovered from the Great Recession. While no one has gotten overly triumphalist, it took the United States quite awhile to recover its pre-crisis peak and unemployment remains persistently elevated,  I think it’s safe to say that mainstream commentators, people like Matt Yglesias and Derek Thompson, are the most optimistic that they’ve been in the past several years. And this seems justified: there’s been a long stretch of private sector job growth and the economy has been posting steady, if unremarkable, growth rates for the past several years. There is, of course, wariness over the impact of sequestration and substantial disagreement over the future course of the US economy, but I read an awful lot of economic commentary and the general discourse has shifted out of crisis-mode to business as usual.

Russia, meanwhile, continues to take heat for its supposed economic mismanagement. Writing for the Legatum Institute Ben Judah lambasted the Russians for their reckless "economic populism” and bemoaned their loss of budget discipline. Leon Aron, writing for Foreign Affairs, noted that the Kremlin was facing a "tough economic environment” but nonetheless foolishly insisting on a comprehensive campaign of re-armament. And both of these complaints are exceedingly mild-mannered and reserved compared to Owen Matthews’ apocalyptic predictions of Russia’s rapidly approaching economic collapse. 

So I had a truly radical thought: I would together a few charts showing how the United States and Russia have rebounded since the onset of the great recession. I obviously have my own interpretation of the information contained in these graphs (to make a long story short I think that Russia has actually handled the crisis pretty decently) but in this case I want to keep my own opinions on the short side and allow people to draw their own conclusions. So, without further delay, let’s get to the graphs!

First, real quarterly GDP from FRED and Rosstat.

Next, net government debt from the IMF’s world economic outlook database:

Next, unemployment also from the IMF:

Next, from the World Bank, real GDP per capita (please note that at an absolute level the United States’ GDP per capita is MUCH higher than Russia’s, this is simply about the change since 2007):

And finally, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Rosstat, inflation:

Does any of the above paint Russia as some sort of dramatic success story that should be emulated by other countries? Not really. But I always find it interesting to compare Russia’s actual economic performance (pretty decent) with how it is most commonly described (awful, worsening, incompetent, or catostrophic). I also find it funny to think how people would describe Russia if, like the United States, it had doubled its government debt, never reduced unemployment to its pre-crisis level, or had gone through almost seven full years without any real increase in per capita output.