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The world is still recovering from the most recent global recession associated with the 2008-09 financial crisis and the possibility of another downturn persists as the global economy struggles to regain lost ground. But, what is a global recession? What is a global recovery? What really happens during these episodes? As the debates about the recent global recession and the subsequent recovery have clearly shown, our understanding of these questions has been very limited. This publication tracks the global business cycle through the destruction of a global recession to the renewal of recovery, drawing on four majorepisodes in the past half century. It defines key terms, documents the main features of a global recession and recovery, and describes the events that take place around these episodes. The book also puts the latest global recession and ongoing recovery in perspective.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of financial cycles using a large database covering 21 advanced countries over the period 1960:1-2007:4. Specifically, we analyze cycles in credit, house prices, and equity prices. We report three main results. First, financial cycles tend to be long and severe, especially those in housing and equity markets. Second, they are highly synchronized within countries, particularly credit and house price cycles. The extent of synchronization of financial cycles across countries is high as well, mainly for credit and equity cycles, and has been increasing

This paper analyzes the interactions between business and financial cycles using an extensive database of over 200 business and 700 financial cycles in 44 countries for the period 1960:1-2007:4. Our results suggest that there are strong linkages between different phases of business and financial cycles. In particular, recessions associated with financial disruption episodes, notably house price busts, tend to be longer and deeper than other recessions. Conversely, recoveries associated with rapid growth in credit and house prices tend to be stronger. These findings emphasize the importance of

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between financial openness and total factor productivity (TFP) growth using an extensive dataset that includes various measures of productivity and financial openness for a large sample of countries. We find that de jure capital account openness has a robust positive effect on TFP growth. The effect of de facto financial integration on TFP growth is less clear, but this masks an important and novel result. We find strong evidence that FDI and portfolio equity liabilities boost TFP growth while external debt is actually negatively