A senior economist has called for the adoption of a new measure to indicate when a country is in recession.

ANZ chief economist Saul Eslake said it was "a bit silly'' to say an economy was in a recession based on two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, which is the definition of a technical recession.

"It's something that isn't transferable across countries with different rates of population and productivity growth,'' Mr Eslake told a business breakfast in Brisbane on Thursday.

He said the definition was "beloved of the media but not of most economists'' and should be replaced by a measure of unemployment.

"I think a far better definition of a recession, and one which is much more meaningful to people who are on the edge of it, looks at the unemployment rate, which says that if unemployment rises by one-and-a-half percentage points or more in 12 months or less, then that's a recession,'' he said.