In what condition does the coalition government leave the UK economy? Needless to say, its members are fighting the general election on the proposition that they have done a fine job of rescuing the crisis-hit economy they inherited. It seems, at the moment, that this argument is not playing that well in the polls. Does it deserve to? Here is a scorecard.
Let us start with the simplest measure of overall economic performance. In the last quarter of 2014, UK real gross domestic product per head was 4.8 per cent higher than it had been in the second quarter of 2010 when the coalition took office, and 6.2 per cent above the trough of the “great recession” in the third quarters of 2009. But it was much the same as in the first quarter of 2007 and below its pre-crisis peak. In the fourth quarter of 2014, real GDP per head was close to 16 per cent below where it would have been if the1955-2007 trend had continued. Even the recovery has not shrunk this gap. This largely explains the disappointment over living standards. (See charts.)
Moreover, this huge shortfall cannot be explained by a pre-crisis boom. On the contrary, the economy was close to its long-term trend in 2007. Booms had been far bigger in the early 1970s, late 1970s and late 1980s. Data on inflation tell much the same story. The argument that the UK economy was in a grossly unsustainable state in 2007 is largely ex-post rationalisation. Even house prices turn out not to have been unsustainably high. What nearly everybody missed was the vulnerability of the UK’s financial sector to a global crisis.