Posts by Liz McKeown

How the ONS is improving its annual earnings survey

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Today the ONS has published the latest data and insights from its Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), which provides a huge amount of detail about the wages of employees in the UK. Liz McKeown takes a look at the latest data, explores how they compare with other data sources on earnings and outlines the steps we are taking to improve these important statistics. 

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GDP: Getting the best insight each month

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Monthly GDP, first introduced in 2018, is a closely followed statistic, showing changes in the size of the UK economy around 40 days after the end of a month. However, it has been questioned whether focusing on such short-term movements risks placing too much weight on a relatively noisy signal about the state of the economy. Liz McKeown sets out how, to help address this, we are changing our presentation of GDP to lead with changes across three-month periods. 

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Exploring this year’s earnings figures

Today the ONS has published its latest annual estimates of employee earnings in the UK. Recognising recent challenges with the data, we have introduced new methods and processing improvements this year, which have resulted in some bigger revisions than usual. Liz McKeown explains the impact of the changes and looks ahead to further improvements in the quality of the data.  

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What matters most to people in the UK and has that changed over time?

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Since 2011, the ONS has been measuring ‘National Well-being’ to evaluate how we are doing as a nation. National Well-being includes the things that people have told us matter most to them, across the environment, society and economy. Here Liz McKeown looks at our GDP & Beyond work, focusing on responses to our recent online survey reviewing how we measure National Well-being. 

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