Australia's economic growth has plunged to the lowest level since the GFC in 2009.

Claims that Australia has enjoyed “28 years of uninterrupted growth” are being disputed by a US federal reserve bank, which argues we have actually endured three recessions during this time.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis is one of 12 regional banks that make up the US central bank and it recently analysed Australia’s economy for lessons on how to manage the US’s record growth.

“It has been argued that Australia hasn’t had a recession in 28 years. But is this really the case?” a blog post on its website said.

A recession is usually defined as two or more consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product (GDP) growth. On this measure, Australia has not had a recession since 1991.

But when the bank looked at Australia’s per capita GDP growth, “the story changes”.

It found there had actually been three recessions if the growth numbers per person were used.

The most recent recession happened in the second quarter of 2018 and continued until the first quarter of this year.

The bank suggested that Australia’s population growth, which has been higher than other industrialised economies for nearly 40 years, may actually be masking the true picture.

“This discrepancy between the growth rate of per capita GDP and the growth rate of GDP implies that population growth has been a key factor for Australia’s economic expansion,” the bank noted.

“A rising population increases the size of the economy, and therefore total output increases, which is reflected in the level of GDP.”

In particular, the bank noted there was a population surge about 2008, during the height of the global financial crisis, which had led to overall positive GDP growth but this had not been enough to prevent recession on per capita terms.

“This means that GDP is growing but oftentimes not fast enough to compensate for population growth,” the bank said.

The bank suggested that the downturns on per capita terms meant that population was growing faster than GDP.

“So should we use Australia as a benchmark when thinking about possible duration of expansions? If so, we have to take it with a grain of salt because looking at just GDP growth doesn’t paint the whole picture.”