A hint on the nature of the current global recession

It’s only for a six-month time period and (importantly) doesn’t attempt to correct for the varying policy responses across countries, but this graph highlighted by the Australian Reserve Bank’s governor, Glenn Stevens, is interesting:

gdp-manufacutring

 

Australia generally imports intermediate capital goods so in the latest numbers the fall in investment was largely balanced out by a fall in imports, while the government’s stimulus handouts probably served to keep consumption up.

As a first guess and without hunting around to see if there are numbers, I suspect that households’ spending of the handouts was also skewed more towards domestically produced goods/services over imports than has been typical for the last few years.

It would be interesting to see trade figures broken down into intermediate and final goods flows more generally.

Hat tip: Peter Martin.