The technical definition of a recession is a time period when a country's gross domestic product (GDP) doesn't grow, and doesn't stay flat, but actually shrinks. The thing is, at this point, we can roughly measure GDP not just for individual countries, but for the whole planet as well. Call it gross planet product (GPP). And according to a new analysis of international data, GPP shrank by 4.9 percent in 2015:
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