[LINK] "The world's worst-hit economies"

[rfmcdonald]

CBC hosts Forbes' Joshua Zumbrum's article on those national economies worst hit by the current recession.

The economy is bad in North America and Western Europe, but at least economists stopped saying the Great Depression II is at hand.

Other countries aren't as lucky. While the International Monetary Fund said Wednesday that much of the world economy "is beginning to pull out of a recession unprecedented in the post-World War II era," the economies of Latvia, Estonia, Iceland, Ireland and Lithuania won't be coming along for the ride, with gross domestic product falling by more than 10 per cent — the standard yardstick for a depression —this year.

And though most of the world is enjoying low inflation, with high unemployment keeping wage and price growth in check, Seychelles, Iceland, Venezuela, Ukraine and Jamaica, saddled with huge government debt burdens, are drowning in it.

Worse, all five countries have weak GDP, creating the ugly phenomenon known as "stagflation," familiar to millions of Americans who weathered the 1970s. In Iceland, the economic collapse led to 8.5 per cent inflation and GDP that fell 10.5 per cent. Call it a stagflationary depression.

The entire article's worth reading.