Is it recession or economic slowdown?

At a recent lunch with one of our guest speakers, Sylvia Nasar, our knowledge of the current economic crisis was put to test. She quizzed a bunch of journalism graduate and undergraduate students about the recession and how U.S. will survive this difficult phase. While conversing with Nasar, she asked something in relation to the countries in recession, and a journalism undergraduate student said, “Isn’t the whole world into recession?” This surprised me a little bit if not much. Probably a common man couldn’t care less about what happens beyond his country, but someone who is preparing to provide news to the world should be aware that not all countries are in recession.

It may sound insignificant at first, since most of the powerful countries are in recession like U.S. United Kingdom, Euro zone. Canada, New Zealand and Australia make for the other set of recessionary economies and Japan has been there for a long time now. Volumes have been spoken about Asia being the future of economic growth, but it is being dragged in with the misused term ‘global recession.’

So, is the news consumption wrong or the news was not delivered at all? It’s surprising how people assume that China and India, the two emerging economies, are in recession already. The fact is that they are not totally immune from the financial crisis, but they are not in recession either. The term that we are looking for is ‘economic slowdown.’ There is a significant difference between a recession and economic slowdown, which most of the newspapers take for granted. Now, an offshoot of this argument is that are news consumers really ignorant or is it the newspapers who hardly mention about India’s growth as an economy and doing well amidst the recession. How many newspapers reported on the country’s GDP growth which hit a 7.3 percent in 2008 as opposed to most of the economies starting to fail?

I asked a couple of Indian students and journalists whether they though India was in recession, while the students, studying in U.S. universities said that India is not in recession but is suffering from the global crisis, the journalist stated that it is definitely in recession.

My intention is not to belittle people’s knowledge of world news; probably I would have had the same knowledge as the others had I not had a keen interest in business and economic reporting. It’s the way business journalism function which makes me question an individual’s knowledge. The purpose of a business journalist should be to educate a layman about concepts and developments worldwide which he would not read anywhere else.