“Look, here we are. We have the fastest growing economy in the world. The world. The world, “Biden said.
Asked for comment on Friday, a White House official did not specifically try to defend Biden’s claim that the United States has the fastest growing economy in the world.
Instead, the official pointed out that the 5.7% growth of the real US gross domestic product in 2021 is the fastest for the country since 1984. The official also pointed out that the International Monetary Fund forecasts that by the fourth quarter of this year, the size of the US economy will be higher than at the end of 2019 before the pandemic than any of the other six countries in the international forum known as the Group of Seven: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom.
These comments are accurate. But Biden said three times on Kimmel’s show that the U.S. economy is growing faster than any other country in the world, not just growing faster than six specific countries. And this is incorrect.
“It is clear that the United States is the G-7 economy, which is doing best in terms of GDP growth since the beginning of COVID, but it is not literally the fastest growing economy in the world during this period,” said Jan. Maria Milesi-Ferretti, a former employee of the International Monetary Fund, is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Fiscal and Monetary Policy of the Hutchins Brain Trust.
How the United States is compared
Biden took office at the end of January 2021. Among the dozens of countries that saw faster real GDP growth than the United States in 2021 were Ireland (13.5%), Chile (11.7%), Turkey 11%), Colombia (10.6%), India (8.7% for the fiscal year started in April 2021), Greece (8.3%), Israel (8.2%), China (8, 1%), the United Kingdom (7.4%), France (7%) and Italy (6.6%), according to data published by the IMF and governments. (Growth rates in many countries were higher than usual in 2021 as their economies recovered from the 2020 economic crisis caused by the pandemic.) Economic forecast released this week by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development , predicted that the United States would grow by 2.5% in 2022. This is lower than the OECD’s 2022 forecast for 11 other members of the Group of 20’s international forum: Saudi Arabia (7.8%), India (6.9% for the fiscal year), Indonesia (4.7%), China (4.4%), Australia (4.2%), Spain (4.1%), Canada (3.8%) , Turkey (3.7%), the United Kingdom (3.6%), Argentina (3.6%) and South Korea (2.7%).
We will add a warning. There are different ways to measure growth – among other things, you can choose different starting and ending points and different indicators of economic activity – and there are different complications associated with the data.
Laura Veldkamp, a professor of finance at Columbia University’s business school, said there was “no way” Biden’s claim would be true if he used “fastest growing” in the usual way, targeting a percentage change. However, she said she would personally describe the president’s statement as “misleading” and not untrue, as “the word growth in conversation can mean many things.”
We will respectfully adhere to our harsher conclusion. If Biden was quoting some unusual or obscure measure of growth, he could explain it. He didn’t, and neither did the White House when asked for comment.
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