IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepcvd/cepcovid-19-026.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Real-time updates on the UK economy: trends, expectations and implications from business survey data

Author

Listed:
  • Josh De Lyon
  • Swati Dhingra

Abstract

Covid-19 has caused substantial shocks to the UK economy, highlighting a need for real-time data to analyse trends. We use monthly business survey data from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) to document recent trends and future expectations on multiple measures of firms' activity. The majority of firms have increased their volume of business every month since April 2021 but this growth is weakening. The decline is mirrored in expectations which have also become less optimistic. There is a narrowing gap between wage growth and price growth, pointing to a period of lower real wage growth. Labour shortages are affecting firms in all sectors, with at least half of all businesses in each sector experiencing a shortage of workers. Approximately half of firms report difficulty recruiting new workers while around one in five firms report issues retaining existing staff. One in ten firms report that the UK's point-based immigration regime is causing labour shortages.

Suggested Citation

  • Josh De Lyon & Swati Dhingra, 2021. "Real-time updates on the UK economy: trends, expectations and implications from business survey data," CEP Covid-19 Analyses cepcovid-19-026, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepcvd:cepcovid-19-026
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-026.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lee Elliot Major & Stephen Machin, 2020. "Covid-19 and social mobility," CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance 583, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    2. Rui Costa & Nikhil Datta & Stephen Machin & Sandra McNally, 2018. "Investing in People: The Case for Human Capital Tax Credits," Working Papers 2018-030, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    3. Machin, Stephen & Costa, Rui & Dhingra, Swati, 2019. "Trade and Worker Deskilling," CEPR Discussion Papers 13768, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. Jiaqi Li & Anna Valero & Guglielmo Ventura, 2020. "Trends in job-related training and policies for building future skills into the recovery," CVER Research Papers 033, Centre for Vocational Education Research.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Swati Dhingra & Thomas Sampson, 2022. "Expecting Brexit," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 14(1), pages 495-519, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jiaqi Li & Anna Valero & Guglielmo Ventura, 2020. "Trends in job-related training and policies for building future skills into the recovery," CVER Research Papers 033, Centre for Vocational Education Research.
    2. Bloom, Nicholas & Bunn, Philip & Chen, Scarlet & Mizen, Paul & Smietanka, Pawel & Thwaites, Gregory, 2019. "The impact of Brexit on UK firms," Bank of England working papers 818, Bank of England.
    3. Breinlich, Holger & Leromain, Elsa & Novy, Dennis & Sampson, Thomas, 2020. "Voting with their money: Brexit and outward investment by UK firms," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 124(C).
    4. Capucine Riom & Anna Valero, 2020. "The business response to Covid-19: the CEP-CBI survey on technology adoption," CEP Covid-19 Analyses cepcovid-19-009, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    5. Sergei Guriev & Elias Papaioannou, 2022. "The Political Economy of Populism," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 60(3), pages 753-832, September.
    6. Swati Dhingra & Rebecca Freeman & Hanwei Huang, 2023. "The Impact of Non‐tariff Barriers on Trade and Welfare," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 90(357), pages 140-177, January.
    7. Rachel Griffith & Peter Levell & Agnes Norris Keiller, 2021. "Potential Consequences of Post‐Brexit Trade Barriers for Earnings Inequality in the UK," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 88(352), pages 839-862, October.
    8. Holger Breinlich & Elsa Leromain & Dennis Novy & Thomas Sampson, 2019. "Exchange rates and consumer prices: evidence from Brexit," CEP Discussion Papers dp1667, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    9. Halmai, Péter, 2020. "A dezintegráció gazdaságtana. A brexit esete [The economics of disintegration. The case of Brexit]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(9), pages 837-877.
    10. Humlum, Anders & Munch, Jakob R. & Rasmussen, Mette, 2023. "What Works for the Unemployed? Evidence from Quasi-Random Caseworker Assignments," IZA Discussion Papers 16033, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    11. Swati Dhingra & Thomas Sampson, 2022. "Expecting Brexit," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 14(1), pages 495-519, August.
    12. Kirill Borusyak & Peter Hull, 2020. "Non-Random Exposure to Exogenous Shocks: Theory and Applications," Working Papers 2020-130, Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics.
    13. Facundo Albornoz & Jake Bradley & Silvia Sonderegger, 2020. "The Brexit referendum and the rise in hate crime; conforming to the new norm," Discussion Papers 2020-12, The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
    14. Paweł Bukowski & Gregory Clark & Attila Gáspár & Rita Pető, 2022. "Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949–2017," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 35(4), pages 1551-1588, October.
    15. Beglaryan, Mane & Shakhmuradyan, Gayane, 2020. "The impact of COVID-19 on small and medium-sized enterprises in Armenia: Evidence from a labor force survey," Small Business International Review, Asociación Española de Contabilidad y Administración de Empresas - AECA, vol. 4(2), pages 298-298, September.
    16. Dorn, David & Levell, Peter, 2021. "Trade and Inequality in Europe and the US," CEPR Discussion Papers 16780, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    17. Magli, Martina, 2022. "The Spillover Effect of Services Offshoring on Local Labour Markets," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 351, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    18. Josh De Lyon & Swati Dhingra, 2020. "Covid-19 and Brexit: Real-time updates on business performance in the United Kingdom," CEP Covid-19 Analyses cepcovid-19-006, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    19. Shafik, Minouche, 2021. "Capitalism needs a new social contract," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 112213, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    20. Ron Hira, 2020. "Outsourcing: A Case of Shared Mental Models in Conflict," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 73(3), pages 410-435, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Covid-19; Brexit; UK economy; business performance; employment; wages; labour shortages;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:cepcvd:cepcovid-19-026. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/covid-19-analyses/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.