The commentariat’s announcement last week that the New Zealand economy was in an ‘official recession’ by March 2023 – two quarters of output/GDP decline – was greeted with white faces by officials in the Reserve Bank and Treasury. There was queuing for the lavatories; some of the forecasters handed in their resignations to the Minister of Finance; one or two tested the windows to see whether they could jump out.
OF COURSE NOT. The officials would have been puzzled by the term ‘official recession’, since neither institution nor Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) use it. Later the commentariat changed the term to ‘technical recession’; I doubt any serious economist has the foggiest idea what a ‘non-technical recession’ is.
