Graeme Chamberlin’s research while affiliated with Office for National Statistics and other places

It is now widely accepted that early vintages of GDP data are likely to undergo a series of revisions as more information becomes available to National Statistics Institutions. This, however, creates a trade-off between timeliness and accuracy for data users such as monetary policy-makers. This article investigates the importance of data revisions for the operation of monetary policy in the UK. I find data revisions have been smaller in the last decade and early data vintages provide a relatively good signal of data released at a later date. There is though evidence of cyclicality and structural breaks in the data revision process which should caution data users against assuming data revisions are predictable. I also look at the role of the output gap in the practical implementation of monetary policy through the Taylor rule. While revisions to GDP data account for some of the mismeasurement of the output gap, I conclude that it is a relatively small culprit. The main cause of output gap revisions is due to the difficulty in estimating the level of potential output towards the end of the sample where statistical filter methods are generally unreliable.

As a measure of economic activity, gross domestic product (GDP) is a useful indicator of output and suitable for using in estimates of productivity. However, as a measure of welfare, it has several limitations. This article follows Sefton and Weale (1996, 2005) in producing an estimate of real income ‐ a corrected or adjusted version of GDP ‐ that is linked to current and future consumption possibilities. This measure of real income differs from real (money) GDP by taking account of capital consumption, net income and transfers from overseas, and uses a consumption deflator rather than a general GDP deflator so that output is valued in terms of consumption units.

China's economic growth over the last two decades has been truly remarkable. Averaging near double‐digit percentage growth each year, it is now the second largest economy in the world based on gross domestic product (GDP) and is expected, one day, to overtake the USA and become the largest. China's growth has been predominantly export driven and centred in manufacturing, especially since joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001. This article looks at how the rise of China has impacted on the UK's international trade and investment and also how the continuing development of China may affect these in the future.

In the last couple of years there has been strong interest in economic statistics as the UK economy recovers from its deepest post war recession. This article updates previous work examining the coherence between official economic data published by the Office for National Statistics and widely-used business survey data in the form of the Purchasing Managers Index to include this latest period.

The relationship between changes in output and the unemployment rate is of significant interest around times of recession and economic recovery. This article looks at various aspects of this relationship over time, across various constituents of the labour market and across different countries. The article also explores the interactions between changes in the unemployment rate with the household population, economic activity rate, average hours and labour productivity in accounting for recent output movements in the UK economy and how these compare to previous recessions and recoveries.

Google Trends data provides weekly reports on the number of search queries made by people in a geographical area and by category. As over three quarters of those who access the Internet regularly are looking for information on goods and services ‐ this information may be a useful indicator of economic activity. For example, the volume of queries may relate to future patterns of spending. This article investigates this use of Google Trends data for various search categories, looking at its correlation with official data on retail sales, property transactions, car registrations and foreign trips.

National statistics institutions often face the task of producing timely data, such as monthly and quarterly time series, even though sources are less timely. Temporal disaggregation is the process of deriving high frequency data from low frequency data, and is closely related to benchmarking and interpolation. This article describes and demonstrates some of the available techniques.

This article describes the main features of the last three UK recessions using the output and expenditure measures of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to reflect supply and demand activity in the economy. The most recent recession saw a similar peak to trough fall in GDP as the early 1980s recession. Both these recessions, which coincided with a period of downturn in the global economy, were more severe than the early 1990s recession where the peak to trough fall in output was relatively modest. The services sector made a larger contribution to the latest recession than before, perhaps reflecting the growing share of the sector in total UK output and its strong growth in the years leading up to the downturn. Falling output of business and financial services were a particular feature of the most recent recession. Looking at the expenditure side, gross fixed capital formation, and in particular business investment, was a greater contributor to the fall in GDP in the most recent recession than in the early 1980s and early 1990s recessions.

Real time data are snapshots of unrevised data available at different points in time. This article provides a literature review on how real time databases can be used to better understand the nature of revisions to economic data, and are also a fairer basis on which to evaluate forecasts and policy–decisions made in the past.

New National Accounts data consistent with Blue Book 2010 shows that the total peak to trough fall in GDP during the latest recession was 6.4 per cent, compared to the previous estimate of 6.2 per cent. Preliminary estimates report that GDP growth was 1.1 per cent in the second quarter of the year, with the strong pickup in growth being driven by the business services and finance and construction sectors – which both contributed 0.4 percentage points to the overall growth rate. New data on non-financial balance sheets shows that net worth in the UK fell during the recession, predominately reflecting lower asset prices (such as for equities and residential properties). New Workforce Jobs estimates show that over 1 million jobs were lost in the recent recession, and a more detailed breakdown by industry, especially in the services sector, is provided. Finally, CPI inflation continues to exceed 3.0 per cent, but around 1.7 percentage points is accounted for by the January rise in the rate of VAT.