I wrote yesterday that it doesn’t really matter that the UK is in a technical recession. The zero boundary is unimportant in many aspects of economics, and growth is one – the difference between -0.1 per cent and 0.1 per cent is the same as the difference between 0.1 per cent and 0.3 per cent.
But when economics feeds into politics and the media, the difference does matter. Headlines of “UK not in recession” are far more likely in the event of 0.1 per cent growth than headlines of “UK remains in crippling stagnation”; similarly, the news yesterday was always going to be about the two consectutive quarters of negative growth, not the seven consecutive quarters in which the UK economy has barely changed. Headlines affect how people think, how people think affects how they act, and how they act feeds back into the economy.
All of which is to say that if it didn’t matter that we were in a technical recession when the stats were released at 9:30am yesterday, it probably did by the time the front pages were fixed at 9:30pm.
Gerard Lyons, Standard Chartered’s chief economist, said:
The likelihood is that the data will further dent confidence and push the recovery back.
The second quarter of 2012 was always going to be a weak one. The OBR, which overestimated Q4 2011 growth by 0.1 per cent and Q1 2012 by 0.5 per cent, predicts a flatlining Q2 2012, with 0.0 per cent growth. If their past pattern continues, we should expect a third quarter of contraction – especially as consumer confidence, hit by the news of recession, will depress that quarter still furter.
Little wonder that Philip Aldrick, the Telegraph’s economics editor, is calling this a “lost year“, fearing that the overall contraction in 2012 could be 0.1 per cent. But even there, talk of a lost year glosses over the longer term weaknesses. Nominally positive growth below the rate of population growth results in GDP per capita contracting. Even if we find out, after the final GDP figures come out in two months, that we weren’t in a national recession, we’ve been in a per capita recession for a while. And under OBR and ONS predictions for the rate of GDP and population growth, it won’t be until 2016 that GDP per capita is back to where it was in 2007. That isn’t a lost year; it’s a lost decade.
And even talk of a lost decade is understating the problem. Pay rises have been near at or below inflation for so long that the average weekly wage now is worth the same as it was in September of 2002 – and because price inflation remains higher than wage inflation, this is getting worse, not better. In terms of what you can buy for your wage, we’ve already lost a decade. The trick will be to not lose two.
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