“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”, John Kenneth Galbraith once remarked and recent events have done nothing to prove him wrong. But the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) has a better record than most and its latest forecast suggests that the economy shrank by 0.3 per cent in the final quarter of 2012.
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”, John Kenneth Galbraith once remarked and recent events have done nothing to prove him wrong.
In the last quarter, as you’ll recall, David Cameron and George Osborne boasted that we’re “on the right track” after the economy grew by 1 per cent (later revised down to 0.9 per cent). But that figure was artificially inflated by the Olympic ticket sales, which added 0.2 per cent to growth, and by the bounce-back from the extra bank holiday in June, which added 0.5 per cent. To borrow Cameron’s phrase, the government should never have assumed that “the good news will keep coming”.
While a contraction in quarter four wouldn’t represent an unprecedented “triple-dip recession” (that would require two successive quarters of negative growth), it would make it significantly harder for Osborne to claim that the economy is “healing”. If the economy is shown to have shrunk in Q4, four of the last five quarters will have been negative. We’ll know for sure when the Office for National Statistics publishes its first estimate of GDP on 25 January.
The longer-term outlook for the economy remains unremittingly grim. After a growth rate of 0.0 per cent in 2012, NIESR expects the economy to grow by little more than 1 per cent in 2013 and doesn’t expect output to return to its pre-recession peak until 2014 at the earliest.
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