“Look, here we are. We have the fastest growing economy in the world. The world. The world,” Biden said.
Asked for comment Friday, a White House official did not seek to explicitly defend Biden’s claim that the US has the fastest growing economy in the world.
Instead, the official pointed out that the United States’ real GDP growth of 5.7% in 2021 was the fastest for the country since 1984. The official also pointed out that the International Monetary Fund had forecast that starting in the fourth quarter of this year, the size of the US economy compared to its pre-pandemic level at the end of 2019 will be larger 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 correct. But Biden said three times on Kimmel’s show that the US economy is growing faster than any other country in “the world,” not just growing faster than six specific countries. And that’s inaccurate.
“The US was clearly the G-7 economy that has performed best in terms of GDP growth rates since the onset of COVID, but was not literally the fastest growing economy in the world during that period,” said Gian Maria Milesi- Ferretti, a former International Monetary Fund staffer who is now a Senior Fellow at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution think tank.
How the US compares
Biden took office in late January 2021. The dozens of countries that recorded faster real GDP growth than the US in 2021 included Ireland (13.5%), Chile (11.7%), Turkey (11%), Colombia (10.6%) and India (8.7% for the financial year begun April 2021), Greece (8.3%), Israel (8.2%), China (8.1%), United Kingdom (7.4%), France ( 7%) and Italy (6.6%). ), according to the IMF and the governments of the countries. (Many countries’ growth rates were higher than usual in 2021 as their economies recovered from the 2020 economic crisis caused by the pandemic.) An economic outlook released this week by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development forecast the US would grow 2.5% in 2022. That was lower than the OECD projections for 2022 for 11 other members of the international forum of the Group of 20: Saudi Arabia (7.8%), India (6.9% for the financial year) , Indonesia (4.7%), China (4.4%), Australia (4.2%), Spain (4.1%), Canada (3.8%), Turkey (3.7%), United Kingdom (3.6%), Argentina (3.6%) and South Korea (2.7%).
We will add a constraint. 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 the data come with different complications.
Laura Veldkamp, a finance professor at Columbia University Business School, said there was “no way” Biden’s claim was true using “fastest growing” in the usual way and referring to a percentage change. However, she said that she would personally call the president’s claim “misleading” rather than false because “the word growth can mean many things in conversations”.
We respectfully stick to our harder conclusion. If Biden cited an unusual or obscure measure of growth, he could have explained it. He didn’t, and neither did the White House when asked for comment.
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