2. The DNA of the UK economy makes it more vulnerable in a lockdown recession — but this is not enough to discount a slower recovery?
The services-oriented UK economy remains particularly vulnerable as we adjust to a more socially-distanced world — especially as relative to its peers, the UK has one of the highest contributions of ‘social consumption’ to GDP according to the Bank of England.
However, this alone is not enough to discount a slower UK economic recovery. Indeed, the social environment in individual countries is changing rapidly — places like Australia and New Zealand have seen national lockdown measures sharply increase in recent weeks (albeit from a lower base over summer), whereas the UK has had a very steady decline in lockdown restrictions in recent months (Fig 3 — middle panel). The way in which these different ‘unlocking’ approaches feeds through into consumer activity is a big unknown — but we don’t think it necessarily means that the UK economy is going to be worse hit than other G10 countries over time.
Moreover, the post-pandemic behaviour of consumers is differing materially across countries — and not necessarily in line with the initial health impact of the virus. When also assessing factors like financial worries and the fear of job loss, surveys show the UK consumer may not be the most ‘fearful’ amongst its peers (Fig 3 – LHS & RHS panel). Again, how this feeds through to hard spending data is also a question mark — but, for now, there’s little evidence in survey data to suggest that UK consumption will be significantly slower to recover than elsewhere.
The bottom line is that we don’t have enough evidence in soft or hard economic data yet to justify that the UK economy will be laggard in the post-pandemic recovery. Instead, forthcoming data points could materially impact the assumptions that forward-looking rates markets are currently pricing in.
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