"In recent years" vs "in the recent years"

Solution 1:

Native speakers would generally prefer the second. The article is unnecessary and awkward. Both are correct. Personally, I find them all awkward and am much more likely to say things like "over the last few years" or just "recently".

Solution 2:

In the recent years is hardly found at all. Compared with in recent years, Ngrams shows a flat line for its use. The British National Corpus has two records for it, against 2344 for in recent years. The figures from the Corpus of Contemporary American English are 11 and 9450.

Solution 3:

I'm reading an article titled "A Corpus Analysis of (The) Last/Next+ Temporal Nouns" in the Journal of English Linguistics by Isaiah WonHo Yoo, and he writes that in constructions like "last year" the addition of the definite article shifts the focus, or the initial point in time coordinates, in this way:

(The year is 2013 and a person is speaking of his friend's earlier statement:)

He said in 2003 we will travel abroad together next year. (meaning, in 2014)

Putting in THE shifts the focus to the person in the phrase:

He said in 2003 we will travel abroad together the next year. (meaning, in 2004)

FumbleFingers mentioned this aspect in his comments at this page.

Maybe this THE-induced transformation with "last\next + a temporal noun" is relevant to "in recent years" also.

In the article, I. Yoo uses the terms "deictically anchored coding time" vs. "undeictically anchored predicated time". (see deixis at Wikipedia)