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The Economic Situation

Summary and Appraisal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

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Extract

For the past eighteen months we have been forecasting that recession would be followed, not by a strong recovery, but by a prolonged phase of sluggish output growth and rising unemployment. Developments since the beginning of this year suggest that our previous assessments, so far from being too pessimistic, may if anything have over-stated the prospects for recovery on unchanged policies, though the abolition of hire purchase controls announced recently should impart a small stimulus in the second half of the year.

Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 101 , August 1982 , pp. 3 - 8
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

(1)

This assessment is based on information available up to 16 August, 1982.

References

(note 2 in page 3) The text of the CSO press release of 12 August giving the index for industrial production for June contains an obscure reference to ‘an increase of 2 1/2 per cent in total output since the trough in the spring of 1981’. This figure cannot be derived from the information given in the press notice; it is not, for example, the increase in the all industries index between the second quarter of last year and the second quarter of this, which is 1.5 per cent. It refers, in fact, to the increase in the ‘implied level of output’, i.e. the all items index adjusted for the over- or under-statement of the level of output due to the fact that deliveries rather than production indicators are used to measure output for certain industries within manu facturing. Since the information on stock changes on which estimates of implied output are based is not available yet for the second quarter, the same adjustment has been applied to this quarter as to the first quarter of the year. This gives an increase of 2.3 per cent between the second quarters of last year and this, which has been ‘rounded up’ to 2 1/2 per cent. We fully understand the wish to publish timely estimates of the measure of production change which the CSO considers more appropriate. But where the estimation shades into forecasting of a number not yet available, at the very least the the procedure should be fully explained. The absence of any explanation is bound to lead to the conclusion that this was an attempt to gild the latest set of disappointing output statistics. We should be sorry, indeed, if this were the case.

(note 1 in page 5) A change in the National Accounts treatment of EC budget refunds, which are now seasonally adjusted, also made a significant contribution to the error in our estimate of the first-quarter invisible balance. On the old basis, the invisible surplus would have been £559 million higher.

(note 2 in page 5) Bank lending, which has not been subject to formal controls since 1971, has taken an increasing share of the market for consumer credit. The outstanding stock of bank advances to persons (other than for house purchase), which five years ago was less than one half of the size of the stock of hire purchase debt outstanding, is now nearly as large.

(note 3 in page 5) The evidence was reviewed in D. Savage, ‘The channels of monetary influence: a survey of the empirical evidence’, National Institute Economic Review, no. 83, February 1978, pp. 81-2.

(note 4 in page 5) K. Cuthbertson, ‘The determination of expenditure on consumer durables, National Institute Economic Review, no. 94, November 1980.