UK / Double-dip recession could have been a ‘statistical error’

Office for National Statistics says that the trend in economic output was ‘best described as flat’

Real GDP in UK recessions. Source: ONS

The Office for National Statistics has paved the way for erasing Britain’s double-dip recession from the history books, arguing in an article on Wednesday that the state of the economy since autumn 2010 is better described as “flat”.

The standard definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, and the ONS’s current estimates show nine months of consistent decline, starting in the final quarter of 2011.

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