The UK’s trade balance statistics for the first quarter of the year were released yesterday.
Chart of the Week: Week 18, 2016: Historical UK Government Debt
The public sector finances for the financial year 2015/16 were recently released, showing that Public Sector Net Borrowing (excluding publicly owned banks) fell to £74bn (from £91.7bn in 2014/15).
Chart of the Week: Week 17, 2016: GDP Growth by Sector
The preliminary estimate of first quarter GDP growth was released this morning, and it showed that growth had slowed at the beginning of this year to 0.4% (from 0.6% at the end of 2015).
Chart of the Week: Week 16, 2016: Employment by Age Group
Roughly eight years have passed since the pre-crisis peak in employment, and there are almost 1.2 million more people in work today than in the three months between March and May 2008.
Chart of the Week: Week 15, 2016: UK Essentials Inflation
The official CPI measure of inflation picked up in March to +0.5% on the previous year.
Chart of the Week: Week 14, 2016: UK Household Spending
A large quantity of statistics relating to the final quarter of last year were released at the end of last week, and one interesting aspect was that real per capita household spending in 2015 almost returned to the 2007 peak.