Economy

Public services: measuring the part they play in the economy through the pandemic

Categories: Coronavirus, Data, Economy

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has clearly hit the economy of all countries very hard, with big falls in GDP across the world. The UK has seen the output of its public services, such as health and education, hit harder than many other countries. Here Rob Kent Smith explains how we measure the contribution of these important services and why we’ve seen such big declines.  

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Getting the price right: how we have developed new price measures to show how the pandemic has affected inflation

Categories: Coronavirus, Data, Economy, ONS

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic threw up a number of challenges, including how to measure consumer price inflation. Some people asked what inflation would look like if we rebalanced the figures to take account of the different household spending patterns that lockdown brought on. Here Mike Hardie writes about how we have produced these new, rebalanced numbers and what they show.

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Understanding the full business impact of the coronavirus pandemic

Categories: Business, Coronavirus, Data, Economy, ONS
An artists impression of COVID-19 virus and decorative charts

Statistics on the number of business creations and closures are important indicators of the health of the economy. However, the different measures of creation and closure can paint a complex picture. Josh Martin describes some new ways we’re measuring this important metric to support understanding of the longer-run impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy.

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A COVID-19 conundrum: why are nearly half a million ‘employees’ not being paid?

Categories: Data, Economy, ONS

The ONS uses various data sources to measure changes in the UK labour market. One of those, the ‘Real Time Information’ from the HMRC PAYE system, shows a sharp drop in the number of employees, but the Labour Force Survey does not. Here Jonathan Athow looks at a possible explanation for this seeming contradiction.

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Moving online – how ONS is digitising its labour market surveys

Categories: Data, Economy, ONS

As part of our wider response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the ONS has been looking at new ways to measure changes in wages and employment, including using government data sources quicker and introducing new online surveys. Here David Freeman talks about how our work on new surveys is progressing.

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