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The economic crisis which struck initially in the summer of 2007, but which took a much more serious turn in September 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, has been the most serious challenge to global economic prosperity since the 1930s. The OECD countries themselves have suffered seriously, with major falls in output, investment, trade and employment. GDP for the OECD as a whole was estimated to have contracted by -3.5 percent in 2009. But in the developing world, the story has been somewhat more chequered. Initial predictions that developing countries would suffer disproportionately seem to have been unfounded. For the majority of developing countries, their response to the crisis could be characterised as resilience under difficult external circumstances, with a marked decline in average GDP growth but still posting positive figures (on average for all developing countries 1.2 percent in 2009 vis-à-vis 5.6 percent in 2008)