The value of all goods and services produced in a country during a certain period of time is called gross domestic product, GDP. Viewed over the entire period from 1970 until today, GDP has developed weaker in Sweden than in many other OECD countries.
GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced in a country during a certain period. It is used, among other things, to describe the size of an economy. When you talk about economic growth, you usually refer to how much GDP has grown in percentage terms, either on an annual basis or compared to the previous quarter. For Sweden, GDP has increased by an average of 2.1 percent per year seen from 1970 until today.
During the 2000s, we have had four noticeable recessions. In the early 2000s, the IT bubble burst, resulting in low growth, especially in 2001. A much stronger blow came when the international financial crisis broke out in 2008. This crisis caused a record-breaking drop in GDP in 2009. In 2010, a recovery then took place before uncertainty again took over during the European debt crisis of 2011 and 2012. The recession that followed the financial crisis proved to be unusually protracted as it took until 2015 before it turned into a boom. In 2020, the corona crisis came and the growth rate for OECD countries fell more in 2020 than during the financial crisis.
From a historical perspective, however, the crises appear only as minor notches in the global growth curve. On average, world GDP has grown by around 3.5 percent per year since 1960. Growth was especially high during the 1960s. During this time, the majority of European countries had growth of four percent or more. Economic activity also increased sharply in several other parts of the world. In Japan, for example, the economy grew by an average of 9.2 percent a year during the 1960s.
GDP figures do not only provide information on how fast different economies are growing. They also tell you how big they are in relation to each other. To study it, one can compare the level of GDP expressed in a common currency. According to this way of measuring, the United States is the world’s largest economy, followed by China and Japan. Sweden comes in 21st place in the list, as can be seen from the diagram at the bottom.
You can also study GDP to get a picture of how great the economic prosperity is in different countries. In that case, you have to divide GDP by the number of inhabitants and also take into account that price levels differ between different countries. A measure that takes these aspects into account is GDP per capita in purchasing power adjusted terms.