Britain didn’t just emerge from recession. It came out of the recession with a bang.
The economic growth we saw reported this morning by the Office for National Statistics It’s not just faster than most economists expected, it’s the fastest growth we’ve seen since the end of the pandemic, when the UK was recovering from lockdown.
But, more than that, there are three other facts that will make the Prime Minister and Chancellor happy (and you can expect them to talk about this number for a long time).
Firstly, it is not just the fact that the economy is growing again after two quarters of contraction (that was the recession).
An economic growth rate of 0.6% is close enough to what economists used to call “trend growth” before the crisis – in other words, it’s the kind of number that means the economy is growing at more or less rates.” normal.”
And normality is precisely what the government wants us to believe we have returned to.
Secondly, this 0.6% means that the United Kingdom is, along with Canada, the fastest growing economy in the G7 (we still have no news from Japan, but economists expect its economy to contract in the first quarter) .
Third, it is not just the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that is on the rise. The same goes for gross domestic product per capita – the number you get when you divide our national income by every person in the country.
After seven years without any growth, GDP per capita increased by 0.4% in the first quarter. And since GDP per capita is a better measure of the “feel-good factor,” perhaps this means that people will finally start to feel better.
But this is where the problems come in. Because while this latest set of GDP numbers is undoubtedly positive, the earlier numbers are undoubtedly bleak.
GDP per capita is still considerably lower, in real terms, than it was in 2022, before the mini-budget, or, in this case, lower than it was at the beginning of 2019.
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This raises another question: when people think about the state of the economy before the election (and obviously these new numbers will likely increase speculation about the election date), do they give more weight to the years of economic disillusionment or the recovery after them? ?
Do they focus on the fact that we are now growing at a decent rate or on the fact that their per capita income is, in real terms, no higher today than it was five years ago?
These are the questions we will all be pondering in the coming months – as the next elections approach.
One thing is for sure: this won’t be the last time you hear about these GDP numbers.
This story originally appeared on News.sky.com read the full story
