[20200810]IN11478_了解第二季度GDP下降.pdf

CRS INSIGHT Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress INSIGHTINSIGHTi i Understanding the Second-Quarter Fall in GDP August 10, 2020 On June 8, 2020, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an independent, nonprofit research group, officially declared that the U.S. economy entered a recession in February of this year. On July 31, the U.S. Department of Commerces Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released estimates that the economy, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), contracted at an annual rate of 32.9% in the second quarter of 2020 compared to the preceding quarter. In other words, if this pace of decline were to continue for four quarters, the economy would have shrunk by about one-third compared to the first quarter. It is expected that this figure will be adjusted slightly in the coming weeks, as is common with initial BEA advance estimates. Still, the decline in GDP is significant and is in addition to the 5.0% annualized contraction experienced in the first quarter of the year. As shown in Figure 1, the second-quarter contraction is the largest decline since BEA first started compiling data in 1948, and more than three times larger than the second-lar