ONS has radical plans to fundamentally update and enhance the way it calculates many of the UK’s key economic statistics. More detailed information about the dominant services sector and more data on smaller firms add up to the biggest overhaul of GDP in a generation, as Rob Kent-Smith reveals.
Read more on Transforming GDP: Economic statistics for a digital age
On any ranking, devising new trade policy for after Brexit and solving the productivity puzzle must be among the biggest economic policy challenges facing the UK. Following the latest ONS labour productivity release, Philip Wales highlights new work that shows how trade and productivity are closely related.
Read more on Two economic policy challenges walk into a bar. One says to the other: ‘Are we related?’
ONS publishes widely used estimates of household income, including how much people earn, what benefits they receive and how much they pay in taxes as well as looking at the gap between the richest and poorest households. Here Dominic Webber writes about the important work to improve the quality of these statistics and provide more detailed information on this much debated topic.
Read more on Minding the gap: how we’re improving our measurement of income inequality
After 70 years of production Gross Domestic Product (GDP) remains the single most closely watched economic indicator. The success of government economic policy is judged against it and it’s the yardstick for the scale of public spending and debt. As Rob Kent-Smith explains, calculating GDP requires the informed balancing of sometimes contradictory data sources.
Read more on Getting the balance right – how ONS creates a single estimate of GDP
In February 2017 ONS funded the establishment of a new independent research centre, the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE). Its objective is to bring economic research closer to the production of economic statistics and identify new ways to address the fast-paced changes observed in the UK economy. Richard Heys explains.
Read more on A new way of looking at changing household incomes and prices