And just how is the recovery going?

Data for the first quarter of 2010 was released today (and will be revised as new data comes in, so let's not get too excited one way or the other). It shows 3.2% growth, at an annual rate, in real GDP. This works out to about 0.8% growth from the fourth quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2010. Based on our experience with recoveries from recessions, are we recovering rapidly or slowly from this one? I've put together a table showing the quarter-over-quarter growth for the first three quarters following the troughs of recessions, beginning with the 1960/61 recession (trough in February 1961, or the first quarter of 1961 for GDP purposes). For the purposes of this table, I'm assuming that we'll eventually conclude that the trough of the 2007/09 recession occurred in June 2009 (or the second quarter of 2009).

Trough.............Q1.............Q2.............Q3.............3 Quarter Growth
Feb 61..........+1.82%.....+1.62%......+2.04%...............+5.57%
Nov 70.........+0.87%.....-1.11%.......+2.85%................+5.57%
Feb 75..........+0.77%.....+1.73%......+1.46%................+4.00%
Jul 80...........-0.26%.....+1.59%... ...+2.12%.................+2.87%
Nov 82.........+1.22%......+2.29%... ..+1.97%................+5.58%
Mar 91.........+0.48%......+0.36%.....+0.52%........... .....+1.37%
Nov 01.........+0.48%......+0.36%..... +0.63%............. ....+1.48%
Jun 09..........+0.75%.....+1.24%.... .+0.80%.................+2.81%

Well, we have 8 recessions here. Three of them (troughs in 2/61, 11/70, and 11/82) had fairly robust growth over the first three quarters of recovery, around 5.5% to 5.6% over those 3 quarters, a little more than a 7% annual rate of growth. In another (2/75 trough), the recovery's first three querters saw 4.0% growth, a little more than 5% on an annual basis. This recovery has been fairly similar (albeit with a very different quarterly growth pattern) to the recovery beginning in 7/80--about 2.8% over the three quarters (or about 3.7% or so on an annual basis).

The current recovery is about twice as robust as the recoveries from the two immediately preceeding recessions (ending in 3/91 and 11/01), but those recoveries were barely worthy of the term.

Overall, this has not been, so far, a robust recovery (5.5% or so growth over the first three quarters of recovery). It has not been even an "average" recovery, which would require three quarters of growth totalling about 4%. But things could be, I suppose, worse....

The detailed BEA news release is here.