The paper reviews some key characteristics of the recoveries experienced by the seven major OECD countries in the 1970s and 1980s. It presents data on the cyclical evolution of demand components, fiscal and monetary variables, labour market and inflation around cyclical troughs. A final section sketches the main features of the recovery which is envisaged in the latest OECD projections, presented in Economic Outlook No 49, and compares them with those of earlier periods ...