According to the revised data, only 0.2 per cent growth was still measured in the British economy in October, although this is an improved number as the first estimate included a 0.1 per cent increase month-on-month in October. Analysts expected a monthly GDP expansion of 0.4 percent for November. According to an ONS report on Friday, Britain’s gross domestic product grew by 1.1 percent in real terms in the three months to November.
According to the Statistics Office, all of this means that UK GDP was already 0.7 per cent higher in November than in February 2020, the last full month before national restrictions imposed in March 2020 to curb the coronavirus pandemic.
The Office for National Statistics stressed that for the first time, the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) had exceeded pre-pandemic levels.
According to preliminary calculations, the value of UK GDP as a whole in the last quarter of last year was at or exceeded the value measured in the last full quarter before the coronavirus pandemic, i.e. in the fourth quarter of 2019, assuming no decline of more than 0.2 in cent in December compared to November.
However, financial analysts in London expected a slowdown in the consumer in December due to the emergence and rapid spread of the Omicron virus variant in the UK economy. In his assessment of November GDP data on Friday, Samuel Tombs, chief UK economist for Macroeconomics Pantheon in London, said:
The company expects UK GDP to decline at a rate of nearly 0.6 per cent in December and 0.3 per cent month-on-month in January.
However, Tombs stressed that the wave of coronavirus infections caused by omicrons – in part because of the speed of the UK’s third vaccination campaign to inject the booster vaccines – appears to be fading out just as quickly as it caught it. Based on this, the House of Representatives expects the UK government to allow the current restrictions to fight the pandemic to expire without an extension after the January 26 deadline, and as a result, GDP growth is expected to pick up from February. Overall, Pantheon’s macroeconomic forecast expects quarterly GDP to exceed its last peak before the coronavirus pandemic in the second quarter of this year.
The UK government for the first time issued a nationwide lockdown at the end of March 2020 to curb the coronavirus epidemic, which caused a free fall in the performance of the British economy: it fell by 19.4 per cent in real terms in the second quarter of 2020 and by a year by a rate of 9.4 per cent in value real. gross domestic product. The decline in GDP measured in both the second quarter of 2020 and the year as a whole was unprecedented in the recent history of the British economy. The value of the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) has plummeted to 2013 levels in 2020, which means the shock of the coronavirus pandemic has consumed seven years of growth in one year.
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