UK Statistics

Economic review: September 2016

Main points

The main economic stories from national statistics produced over the latest month, painting a coherent picture of the UK economic performance using recent economic data.

Post referendum data

Our estimates for Retail Sales, Consumer Price Index (CPI), Producer Price Index (PPI), vacancies and experimental claimant count statistics covering data for July generally follow existing trends. For example, while CPI remained little changed in July and is low by historic standards, input and output prices for UK manufacturers continued to rise in the year to July 2016. The changes in PPI can be partly attributed to changing oil and petroleum prices which, alongside the sharp depreciation in sterling immediately after the EU referendum result, may also have had an impact on input producer prices.

GDP

The second estimate of gross domestic product (GDP) for Quarter 2 (April to June) 2016 – a period that almost entirely covers the period immediately prior to the EU referendum – indicated that the UK economy grew by 0.6%, unchanged from the preliminary estimate.

Following recent trends, household consumption remains the largest contributor to quarter on same quarter a year earlier GDP growth – adding 1.9 percentage points over this period.

FDI

The share of UK-owned foreign direct investment (FDI) assets held in the EU has been falling since 2011 and the rate of return on direct investments in the EU and all other overseas regions has also been falling over the same time period. In contrast, the value of the stock of overseas investment in the UK has been increasing for all overseas regions, with the EU also seeing an increase in the rate of return on their FDI holdings in the UK.

Labour market

The unemployment-to-vacancy ratio for April to June 2016 dipped to its lowest level since November to January 2005. This potentially reflects a tightening of the labour market, according to this measure.

Gender pay gap

Analysis of hourly earnings distribution and growth in earnings for those in continuous employment, using Annual Survey Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2015 data shows differences between men and women. Similar differences can be observed between those in part-time and full-time employment. For both genders, there is a greater concentration of hourly earnings around the National Minimum Wage (NMW) at the lower end of the income distribution compared to periods prior to the introduction of the NMW.

Table of contents

  1. Authors
  2. Main points
  3. Introduction
  4. Summary of ONS data covering post-referendum period
  5. GDP commentary and analysis of M2
  6. Foreign direct investment analysis by region
  7. Recent developments in the UK labour market
  8. Analysis of 2015 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings data by gender and working patterns
  9. Analysis relevant to the Independent Review of UK economic statistics
  10. Annex A: Dates of our upcoming releases
  11. UK demand and supply side indicators

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Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.1.0.

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