Has Britain escaped a triple-dip recession? We just don’t know.
Today’s preliminary data on economic growth in the first quarter of 2013 must have triggered a sigh of relief in Downing Street, showing as they do a slight – very slight – increase in GDP and thus bucking predictions that the country was sliding into an ignominious triple dip recession.
But the Chancellor shouldn’t feel too relieved; in actuality, we have no idea whether the country grew in the past three months. Read more
Economic woe? Join the club
Only eight countries have seen their GDP drop since 2007 and their government debt top 100 percent of GDP; you can probably name five of that select group easily. Yes, they are the usual Eurozone suspects, plus Japan. But who are the other three?
Perhaps surprisingly, they are all Caribbean countries. Read more
Why GDP levels matter as well as growth
With the focus on today’s UK GDP numbers showing the UK is technically back in recession after the economy shrunk 0.2 percent in the first quarter, it is worth remembering another important aspect of GDP – levels.
The most recent IMF World Economic Outlook shows clearly that three of the G7 economies Japan, the UK and – more drastically – Italy have never managed to go back to pre-crisis levels of GDP.
GDP growth rebased
Source: IMF
Why does this matter? Well it isn’t until pre-crisis levels of GDP are reached it can be meaningfully said economies have returned to some sort of normality (my colleague Keith Fray has written more about this) Read more
Endless revisions of economic indicators
Markets promptly react to flash releases of economic indicators and large sums of money are lost or made based on zero-point-something percentage points of GDP growth. But, in the excitement of new economic data, it is worth remembering how data is subject to frequent and quite substantial revisions.
Notoriously, in 2010 Japan’s most watched economic indicator was drastically revised downwards, slicing off a full 3.5 percentage points from the annualised growth rate first reported for the third quarter of 2009, prompting soul searching about the quality of Japanese economic data. But revisions occur across many countries and not only after the flash releases.
An OECD database of the various edition of the monthly publication of the Main Economic Indicators (MEI) shows how widespread the issue is. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Kate Allen works in the editorial statistics team in London. She previously specialised in housing data reporting for a national trade magazine.
Chris Cook works in the FT's comment team. After joining the FT in 2008 as a Peter Martin Fellow, he worked for two years as a leader writer and then as education correspondent.
Emily Cadman joined the FT in 2010 and is head of the interactive desk.
Martin Stabe works on the FT's interactive team, specialising in databases for interactive graphics.
Keith Fray heads the editorial statistics team, providing data for articles and graphics. His background is in economics, studying at Birkbeck College, London.
Norma Cohen is the FT's Demography Correspondent.
Valentina Romei is a statistical researcher at the FT. She joined the FT in 2008 after working both as an academic and market researcher.
