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Almost deserted airport in Washington (photo taken April 2020).
Photo: KEVIN LAMARQUE / REUTERS
The economic performance of the USA fell sharply last year due to the corona crisis.
As shown by government data published on Thursday, the world's largest economy shrank by 3.5 percent.
That was the sharpest decline since the end of the Second World War and underlines that the pandemic also triggered an economic crisis of historic proportions in the USA.
However: Compared to many other leading industrial nations, the decline in the USA is not that great.
In Germany, for example, economic output fell by five percent in 2020.
In the UK, the economy could even shrink by a double-digit percentage.
At the beginning of the crisis, most US economists had expected an even worse slump, but the economy stabilized again in the second half of the year, thanks in part to massive economic stimulus packages.
The US Congress had launched aid packages worth up to $ 3 trillion in the first half of the year.
More than 20 million jobs lost
Most recently, the world's largest economy shrank to 2009 as a whole as a result of the global financial crisis.
According to the official data, a slump as severe as in 2020 had not been registered since 1946.
At that time, economic output had declined by 11.6 percent.
In the meantime, the US economy is back on a growth path - which, however, could also have something to do with the measures to combat pandemics, which are loose in many places compared to Europe.
In the fourth quarter of 2020, annual growth was four percent, as the government announced.
In the usual way in Germany, this would correspond to growth of around one percent compared to the previous quarter.
The weekly new jobless claims also fell slightly, but remained at a historically high level.
In the week up to January 23, 847,000 people submitted an application for the first time, the Ministry of Labor announced.
According to corrected information, 914,000 people applied for unemployment benefits for the first time in the previous week.
The initial applications reflect the short-term development in the US labor market.
This means that around 18.3 million people received some form of unemployment benefit at the beginning of January.
After the outbreak of the pandemic, the number of people employed outside agriculture fell within a few weeks from initially 152 million to just 132 million people.
It is now back at 142 million.
Before the pandemic came to a head last March, the US economy was booming.
At 3.5 percent, the unemployment rate was lower than it had been in decades; in December it was 6.7 percent.
No country in the world is as badly affected by the pandemic in absolute terms as the USA.
So far, the authorities in the country of around 330 million inhabitants have reported around 25.6 million confirmed infections and around 430,000 deaths.
For the current year, most analysts expect robust growth in the US economy, boosted by the economic stimulus packages and the ongoing vaccination campaign.
The hope is that thanks to the corona vaccinations, a slow return to normal economic activity will be possible from the middle of the year.
So far, around 21 million people in the United States have received at least one dose of vaccine.
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beb / dpa
