Country specific economic recession/financial crisis data?
Several articles use data sets on this issue but I am not sure that all the data sets are freely available.


Valencia &amp; Laeven (2012) use the IMF country reports to create their data set. It covers all IMF member countries since 1970.
EDIT: it is available here, as pointed out by @dismalscience.
Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) have 70 countries since roughly 1900 based on a wide set of sources. 
Romer &amp; Romer (2017) construct financial distress index at semi-annual frequency for 24 countries based on the OECD Economic Outlook. It is available since 1967. This data set is freely available and also contains a measure for the depth of the crisis.