The advanced economies club has officially entered a recession. The pandemic has dealt an unprecedented blow to the group of countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with a drop in GDP of 9.8% in the second quarter of 2020. This is the most marked collapse since there are records, much more pronounced than the 2.3% drop suffered during the first three months of 2009, the hardest moment of the financial crisis. Spain, once again, has a prominent place in the statistics published by the OECD this Wednesday: it registers the largest collapse in the area, with a GDP collapse of 18.48% in the second quarter, only surpassed by the United Kingdom, whose The economy contracted 20.37% in the same period of the year.
Gone are the times when the biggest concern of analysts and governments was the slowdown in the economy. In the second quarter of 2019, a year ago, the GDP of the OECD as a whole moderated its growth, but continued at positive rates (0.4%). 2020 opened with an average quarterly decline of 1.8%, the effect of the first confinement measures imposed after the outbreak of the pandemic outside China.
The fall in the second quarter that the Paris-based organization is advancing this Wednesday confirms what was already written: an intense recession - two quarters in a row in negative - and a future that remains uncertain due to doubts about the evolution of the pandemic.
The United Kingdom, Spain and Mexico have recorded the biggest falls between April and June of this year, but other major economies of the club have suffered double-digit falls. France's GDP fell by 13.8% in the second quarter and Italy by 12.4%, both above the OECD average. Below - although narrowly - are the results of Germany, the United States and Japan, with sinks of 9.7%, 9.5% and 7.8% respectively. The GDP of the euro zone and that of the European Union also suffered a severe setback, 12.1% and 11.7%, respectively.
Compared with the second quarter of 2019, the GDP of the OECD member countries as a whole registered a contraction of 10.9%, which is added to the year-on-year fall of 0.9% in the first three months of the year.
Spain had already been the red lantern of the June forecasts of the International Monetary Fund: the Washington-based body placed it, along with Italy, as the developed country that would end up most affected by the pandemic in 2020, with an annual drop in GDP 12.8%. The National Institute of Statistics (INE) had already warned that the Spanish economy suffered a 5.2% hit in the first quarter, a reflection of just two weeks of confinement, which was followed by the historic 18.5% drop between April and June, marking the second time into recession this century.
