On February 15, 2024, the plane’s wake streaked over Regent Street in London, England.
Dan Kitwood | Getty Images
LONDON – Britain’s gross domestic product grew 0.1% in February, the Office for National Statistics said on Friday, another sign that economic growth is back to sluggish this year.
The quarter-on-quarter data was in line with Reuters poll forecasts. GDP fell by 0.2% compared with the same period last year.
The economy contracted in the third and fourth quarters of 2023, putting the UK into a technical recession.
After recording a slight increase in January, it was revised up to 0.3% on Friday.
Construction output, which drove growth at the beginning of the year, fell 1.9% in February. By contrast, manufacturing output, the largest contributor to GDP, grew 1.1% in February, while growth in the UK’s dominant services sector slowed to 0.1% from 0.3%.
Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics, said in a report that the data “almost confirms that the recession ended last year.”
Dales added: “While we expect the economic recovery to be better than in most countries, we doubt that the recovery will be enough to prevent inflation (and interest rates) from falling further, as is happening in the United States.”
British inflation fell more than expected in March to 3.4%, the lowest in nearly two and a half years.
In the United States, however, prices rose by 3.5%, higher than expected, delaying expectations for the start of interest rate cuts until September.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated soon.
