The coronavirus pandemic has triggered the deepest planetwide recession in decades with the World Bank warning global GDP could contract by a painful 5.2% this year. Yet while the slump is likely to be harsh, a number of past recessions were significantly worse. Click or scroll through to find out the 10 most severe economic downturns of all time.

First up is the early 1990s recession. A whole host of factors contributed to the downturn, from the end of the Cold War and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which precipitated the 1990 oil shock and Gulf War, to a tightening of monetary policy. Other direct and indirect causes include stock market volatility, the bursting of the late 1980s real estate bubble and the US savings and loan crisis.

America got off relatively lightly in the end. The recovery is characterised as being V-shaped, meaning the return to growth was rapid and the downturn only lasted from July 1990 to March 1991. During this time America's GDP fell by a not-too-horrendous 1.5% but unemployment remained high, climbing to 7.8% in June 1992 before finally falling back. But other countries fared less well. Canada was in particularly bad shape financially and the crisis resulted in a change of government there, while Japan entered an L-shaped period of economic malaise, the so-called lost decades, from which it has never truly recovered.

The UK economy was battered by tanking house prices, high interest rates and a hiked-up sterling exchange rate. Britain's GDP declined by 2.5%, unemployment spiked and home repossessions surged during the recession, which started in January 1990 and continued until September 1991. However, Finland was the most affected nation. Reeling from the collapse of the USSR, a key trading partner, the Scandinavian country experienced its worst downturn in history with a fall in GDP of 13% between mid-1990 and mid-1993, and unemploment neared 20%.

Following World War I, economies struggled to transition from a wartime to peacetime footing as returning troops flooded the employment market and union activity waned. On top of this, agricultural commodity prices plummeted plunging farmers into debt, monetary and fiscal policies were in flux and expectations of deflation increased. The storm clouds were gathering.

Already in a fragile state, the global economy was hit in 1918 with something we've become all too familiar with: a devastating pandemic. As well as killing at least 50 million people worldwide, Spanish Flu had a deleterious effect on countries' finances. Much like today, many businesses had to shut down for an extended period of time. In fact, the pandemic likely resulted in a decline in global GDP of around 6% between 1918 and 1921 according to economists Robert Barro, José Ursúa and Joanna Weng.

Needless to say, the world was in recession by 1920. The downturn lasted from January 1920 to July 1921 in the US, which saw unemployment rise to 11.4% and GDP growth sink into negative territory by several digits. Fortunately the country recovered swiftly, without any intervention, and the nation went on to experience a boom in the "Roaring Twenties". Other nations weren't quite so lucky. Australia didn't emerge from recession until 1923, while in Britain GDP is estimated to have fallen 22% between 1920 and 1921, with the rest of the decade marked by rampant joblessness and stagnant growth.

The California Gold Rush of 1849 flooded the US economy with money, which inflated a railway, land and stock market bubble that began to grow perilously big during the early 1850s. Banks readily lent investors bumper loans and the stock market skyrocketed, but when the quantities of gold mined started to decline in the middle part of 1850s, financial institutions and investors alike lost confidence.

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The failure of a major New York commodities firm and Ohio bank in August 1857 led to a large-scale sell-off and run on the banks, bursting the bubble. The sinking of the SS Central America, which was carrying a vast cargo of gold to help offset the panic, intensified the crisis and credit dried up. International trade upsets and weak demand in Europe for American grain only made matters worse. A damaging recession followed.

The downturn soon spread to Europe, South America and the Far East. In the US 5,000 businesses failed and unemployment edged up with the slump lasting until the early 1860s. The effects weren't as pronounced elsewhere. For instance, UK GDP fell by 3.5% briefly but the country's economy bounced back fairly fast.

The post-World War II economic expansion came to a grinding halt in the early 1970s. US price and wage controls, the 1973 and 1974 oil shock, global steel crisis and a nosediving stock market sent the world hurtling into recession. The downturn differs from others in that stagflation was the overriding feature: inflation and unemployment remained high while GDP growth slowed.

This stubborn stagflation made the recession a tricky one for policy makers to deal with. Economic growth in the US was depressed for five consecutive quarters from 1973 to 1975 averaging out at -3.6% and an estimated 2.3 million jobs were lost. The recovery is characterised as U type, which is slower and more drawn out than the V type.

Across the pond, the UK experienced a GDP contraction of up to 3.9%. Inflation shot up to over 20% and the number of jobless swelled. Unlike that of America, the UK's recovery was W-shaped with the country suffering a double-dip recession, while post-recession the government had to go cap in hand to the IMF to ask for an enormous loan in 1976. Countries reliant on oil imports such as France and Japan tended to be most affected during this downturn.

The early 1980s recession was caused in a large part by the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which disrupted the global oil supply and resulted in a shock not unlike the one that occurred in 1973 and 1974. This sent inflation, which was already on the high side due to persistent stagflation, positively soaring in many countries. A slew of governments responded by introducing strict monetarist policies.

These policies eventually helped rein in inflation but they came at a severe cost. Production and consumption of goods and services fell and unemployment increased markedly, peaking at 10.8% in the US, 12.8% in Canada, 11.5% in the UK and 10% in Australia. The downturn spread quickly from developed to developing economies in Latin America, Africa and Asia, which had a hard time recovering.

The US was in recession from July 1981 to November 1982 and saw 3.6% shaved off its GDP. Canada's output dropped by 5%, while the UK's and Australia's contracted by 5.9% and 3.8% respectively. Compounded by drought, the downturn, which lasted from 1982 to 1983 in the country, was Australia's worst since World War II. Thankfully the recovery was rapid.

The deepest and most long-lasting economic downturn since the Great Depression, the Great Recession dragged on from December 2007 to June 2009 in the US, an agonising 18 months, with other countries experiencing similar durations. Although some nations including Spain were trapped in the mire for a considerably longer period. At its root cause was the the US housing bubble, which, buoyed on by everything from deregulation to risky lending practices, developed in the early 2000s and reached its peak in 2006.

The house of cards toppled the following year and residential property prices nosedived, resulting in the subprime mortgage crisis. Many homeowners were left in negative equity and a record number of foreclosures ensued. The crisis spooked investors and the contagion soon spread worldwide, crashing the stock market along with global oil prices. Unemployment jumped to 10% in the US and the country's GDP declined by 4.3%.

Japan's output decreased even more dramatically with GDdP uring the recession down by 8.7%. GDP fell 6.9% in Italy, 6.8% in Germany and 6.4% in the UK. Governments and central banks responded with multi trillion-dollar bank bailouts, massive quantitative easing and other potent mitigating measures, but a number of countries were slow to recover and some such as the UK went on to endure years of biting austerity.

The post-Napoleonic depression affected a multitude of nations in Europe and North America. The period of economic crisis is regarded as a depression rather than recession (two successive quarters of negative growth) as it lasted for more than three years and caused GDP declines in excess of 10%, though this definition is debated. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, Europe's economies were in disarray.

Exports and domestic consumption were down and these factors combined with increased mechanisation gave rise to widespread job losses. The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 caused climatic changes – the 'Year Without a Summer' – that decimated harvests. The British government compounded the problems by passing the Corn Laws, which slapped hefty tariffs on grain imports. Food riots followed and the depression continued until 1821 in the country.

The poor harvests in Europe prompted US farmers to borrow heavily and buy up and invest in land in the West to grow grain for export to the Old World. When European agriculture recovered in 1818, demand for US exports dried up. Concerned farmers wouldn't honour their loans, US banks initiated a mass loan recall, setting off the Panic of 1819, which led to widespread foreclosures, business failures and unemployment. The then-unprecedented crisis persisted until 1822.

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Known up until the 1930s as the Great Depression, the Long Depression certainly lives up to its name, running from 1873 to 1879 or as late as 1897 depending on the country. The crisis that more than overstayed its welcome started with the Panic of 1873 when banks in Europe and North America failed in their droves.

The panic was provoked by all sorts of factors, from over-the-top speculation and demonetisation of silver to major fires in Boston and Chicago, the bursting of a real estate bubble in central Europe and the fallout from the Franco-Prussian War. During the resulting depression US productivity fell by 24%, thousands of American businesses went under and unemployment in the country almost doubled or even tripled if some estimates are to be believed.

The situation in Britain was even more dire and the downturn lasted until 1897. By that time the UK had been overtaken by the US as the world's number one economy. Economic stagnation was also the order of the day in continental Europe, but many countries including Germany recovered faster than the US and UK.

The most infamous global economic downturn of them all, the Great Depression lasted from 1929 to 1939. Triggered by the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the depression, which was exacerbated by the Dust Bowl calamity of the 1930s where dust storms damaged agriculture in the US and Canada and caused many to move to cities for work, devastated the American economy, culminating in a contraction of 26.7%. Countless banks and other businesses failed, unemployment peaked at a staggering 24.9% and the poverty rate hit a record 45%.

The depression reverberated around the world leading to a slowdown in international trade, financial panics, business failures and high unemployment in myriad countries including Germany, setting the scene for the rise of the Nazi party, which manipulated the situation to take power. Other hard-hit countries included France, New Zealand and Chile.

The recovery, which was of the dreaded L-shaped variety, was super-slow in the US. President Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal, a series of reforms, public works projects and other stimulus programmes, got millions of Americans back into work and helped kick-start the economy, but some historians argue the onset of World War II, which created plenty of jobs and boosted US GDP, was the crucial factor that ended the Great Depression.

If you've always thought the Great Depression was the worst economic downturn the world has ever endured, you may have to think again. Historians are increasingly viewing much of the 17th century as a time of all-pervasive economic turmoil and instability. Forget quarters and years, the General Crisis plagued a number of countries around the world for decades.

Political and social upheaval and protracted, exceedingly costly conflicts like the English Civil War and the Thirty Years' War in central Europe (pictured) coupled with other factors such as the Little Ice Age, which brought about extensive crop failures, to pummel economies with some countries including Ming China even going bankrupt.

The crisis resulted in striking population declines in Europe, and the height of the average person on the continent shrank by almost an inch. Despite its downsides, which are numerous, history buffs contend the crisis was key for the transition from a feudal social, political and economic system to a capitalist one and that the years of hardship planted the seeds for the industrial revolution and untold prosperity.

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