We\u2019re still a bit dubious about the UK\u2019s latest growth data. On the face of it, it looks great. Monthly GDP is up by 0.7% over the past three months, relative to the three prior months. Growth for May specifically was a tad better than expected at 0.1%, against expectations of no or even negative growth.<\/p>\n
Yet there is still an active debate over how reflective this is of the underlying growth picture. Surveys are generally weaker; the services purchasing managers index turned markedly weaker in May. And the jobs market continues to paint a very different picture. Private sector payrolls are still falling, and the pace of weakness in consumer services is showing little sign of abating. The Bank of England\u2019s Decision Maker Panel survey points to further modest declines in employment, too.<\/p>\n
The strength in these monthly GDP figures also fits into an eerily familiar pattern, whereby, ever since 2022, the data has been considerably stronger in the first half of the year than the second. Though the Office for National Statistics analysis disputes this, we, like other economists, suspect there are underlying challenges with the way the data is being seasonally adjusted. It follows that we\u2019re likely to see a marked slowdown in growth in the summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019re still a bit dubious about the UK\u2019s latest growth data. On the face of it, it looks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-698194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}