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Comment by niklasrde | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any more figures than what's in the article? In the article it's got these figures:

> The economy is more than a fifth smaller than it was at the end of last year. This fall is not as bad as the 22.7% decline in Spain, but about twice the size of contractions in Germany and the US.

I think Germany's handling was exceptional anyway, and for the US it hasn't hit fully yet. I reckon there's a lot more to come in the UK, as well, when the government furlough scheme comes to an end. And not to forget to mention the country is still in the Brexit transition period, which runs out at the end of the year.

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Interestingly, the Q2 results for Spain are actually better than for the UK (-18.5% vs -20.4%). It's only the comparison to the end of 2019 numbers specifically where Spain comes out worse.

Debatable why, plausibly because the Spanish lockdown started earlier in Q1.

Since the entirety of the rest of the article is about today's Q2 results specifically though, a comparison of those would be more relevant. Smells like the BBC cherry picking to try and find anything where the UK isn't in last place.

It's almost certainly because the Spanish lockdown started earlier in Q1 - if I remember rightly, other articles have mentioned that the UK saw less of an economic decline in Q1 than many other European countries precisely because of the timing of our lockdown. Comparing Q1 to Q2 results and comparing countries based on that would therefore be misleading, because it's not measuring actual economic differences but an artifact of how lockdown timing happened to align with our arbitrary measurement cut-offs.

(Also, speaking of misleading, it's interesting that all of a sudden the BBC can correctly compare US GDP figures with European ones now that it's the UK they're comparing with. Previous coverage quoted US quarterly figures that had been multiplied by four to annualize them next to non-annualized European ones, making it look like the US was doing worse economically than other European countries like Spain when it was doing better.)

I think any handling mainly has come down to luck and how people responded to the threat. The prevalence of the virus isn't evenly spread throughout different regions with mainly the same rules, with just some local adaptations. I think luck is at least as much important as policies, probably much more relevant though.

There is a well made map in this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_recession

I don't believe it's very productive to say who handled it well and who didn't while we're still in the middle of it. Is a massive stimulus/public intervention the right call, or does it just delay the shrinking but adds plenty of public debt?

The same, I believe, goes for comparing infections & death rates. Calling a marathon by who's in the lead at the 10km mark can turn out correct, but it doesn't have to.

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