UK monthly GDP continues to recover after having experienced the biggest dip on record in April when the measure was down 19.5 percent compared with March. Between July and August, GDP in the UK rose for the fourth consecutive month but the pace has slowed while the dent the coronavirus has made in the national accounts remains starkly visible.
As our chart shows, the massive 19.5 percent drop, which coincided with the first full month of lockdown, was the largest monthly fall since such records began in 1997. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, deputy national statistician Jonathan Athow commented: “If you take March and April together the fall was 25 per cent. So in two months the economy shrank by a quarter. The biggest fall we have seen before was just over 2 per ent – so it’s 10 times the size of the largest fall we have seen before the coronavirus. Virtually every sector has been shrinking.”
This chart shows the UK GDP monthly index from 2007 to 2020.
