National Statistical

Gold, in addition to being a hit song by Spandau Ballet, is widely used as a store of value. London is one of the global centres of trading in this commodity, meaning it is an important business for the UK. For many countries the effect of gold on their trade figures is small, but the prominence of the industry in London means it can have a sizeable impact on the UK’s trade figures.

The gender pay gap is +8.6 per cent for full-time employees but -4.4 per cent for part-timers. So one might expect the average for all workers to be somewhere between those figures, but actually it is higher than either, at +17.9 per cent. What’s the reason for that? And how is this puzzle linked with the work of one of the Bletchley Park codebreakers? Jonathan Athow explains.

Investing in research and development (R&D) is one of the key ways that businesses can improve their competitiveness and increase their productivity, an important driver of growth. Here, Office for National Statistics’s (ONS) Deputy National Statistician for Economic Statistics Jonathan Athow looks at the importance of R&D and how the ONS goes about capturing it in its figures, which it publishes in its Gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD) release.