What is low unemployment and low gdp growth symptomatic of?

Question

Obviously there are caveats with GDP, if you build a bridge to nowhere it counts as GDP, but if you mow your own lawn or volunteer to pick up garbage it doesn't count, and so forth and so on. However, assuming unemployment is low, then one could argue people would have less time to preoccupy themselves with volunteer work and contribute to the "economy" as measured by GDP.

I had Germany in mind at the time of writing, so use Germany as a default for the economy in question for this post. Nonetheless, at the risk of going too broad, I think this question can just as easily be posed for the general case. So feel free to broaden the scope beyond Europe.

Question

What is the prevailing theory behind a country exhibiting low unemployment but also low or even negative growth in gdp?

• For brevity, you can specify which GDP you assume (inflation-adjusted, income approach or expenditure approach) or for robustness you can try to address low unemployment coupled with low gdp growth implications under all 3 measures of GDP

Answer 1

One simple explanation can just be that unemployment is artificially low. Perhaps many people went out of the labor force (i.e. stopped looking for a job) after a long period of not being able to find one, and now they don't count as unemployed in the data. Similarly, maybe the economy is not growing enough to create good jobs, but many people are partially employed so that the unemployment rate looks artificially low again because even though people have jobs, they might want to work more hours, but can't.

There might be other more interesting causes, but I think that exploring them will require to zoom in a particular country and take into account the institutional details, etc.