The UK’s National Statistics Office (ONS) has made substantial upward revisions to its estimates of the UK’s economic size in 2021, indicating that the UK’s recovery from the pandemic may be closer to that of other major nations than previously thought.
On Friday, the ONS stated that the UK’s economy grew by 0.6% in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in 2019, whereas earlier estimates had indicated a decline of 1.2%.
The GDP growth for 2021 has been revised upward by 1.1 percentage points to 8.7%, while the recession caused by the pandemic in 2020 has been revised downward from 11% to 10.4%.
In the previous set of quarterly growth data, the ONS estimated that the UK’s economy had shrunk by 0.2% in the three months ending June, still trailing behind the fourth quarter of 2019. This had placed the UK’s recovery from the pandemic at the bottom among the Group of Seven (G7) nations.
However, if the upward revisions to economic size are reflected in the latest data, this would position the UK’s recovery well ahead of Germany, trailing only behind France and Italy.
