SUERF Policy Brief A New Approach for Identifying Growth

Episodes are excluded if the level of real GDP per capita at the end of the episode is lower than in any year before the start of the episode. [...] A considerable number even spanned fifteen years or more, such as those in the Republic of Korea and Taiwan between the 1960s and the 1990s, in several Western European countries and Japan between the 1950s and the 1970s, and more recently in Bangladesh and Vietnam. [...] (2005) criteria, growth only rises moderately in the first year of the identified acceleration episodes and remains elevated in the years after the episodes. [...] This result raises concerns about the accuracy of the endpoints of the growth accelerations identified using those methods that fixed the duration of growth accelerations. [...] Year t is the first year of the growth acceleration, while year T refers to the final year (which is the same as year t+7 for the conventional approaches).