High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The early 2000s recession was a decline in economic activity which occurred mainly in developed countries. The recession affected the European Union mostly during 2000 and 2001 and the United States mostly in 2002 and 2003. The UK, Canada and Australia avoided the recession for the most part, while Russia, a nation that did not experience prosperity during the 1990s, began to recover. Japan`s 1990s recession continued. The early 2000s recession had been predicted by economists for years, because the boom of the 1990s, which was accompanied by both low inflation and low unemployment, had already ceased in East Asia during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The 1990s were also a period of recession between 1995 and 1998 inclusive. The early 2000s recession was not as bad as many predicted it would be, nor was it as bad as either of the two previous worldwide recessions. Many economists object to characterizing it as a "recession," in the United States, since there were not two consecutive periods of negative growth.