Most of this morning’s papers reported on the latest study from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). The figure they’ve chosen to lead on is that the UK has a 70 per cent chance of recession if policymakers fail to resolve the eurozone crisis. What gained less attention was the prediction that there is around a 50 per cent chance of a recession even if the crisis is successfully resolved.
Interestingly, the focus on the eurozone plays into the government’s new emphasis on global factors in the UK’s sluggish growth. When confronted with growth of just 0.5 per cent in the last 12 months at PMQs yesterday, Cameron responded that any growth was good amid the “global storm in the world economy”. This is an important shift, given that in opposition Cameron slammed Gordon Brown for making the same argument, and that the coalition has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the role of the banking crash in creating the deficit, instead blaming Labour’s spending.
The NIESR warned that the economy was in for the slowest recovery in 100 years, and that UK fiscal policy was “too tight” in the short-term. While the eurozone crisis is a concern, the fact that there is a 50 per cent chance of falling back into recession regardless shows that the problem is not just global, but that our leaders are not dealing with it in the right way. If global factors created the crisis, George Osborne’s aggressive deficit reduction strategy has ensured we will not be the first out of it.
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