The UK economy failed to expand at all in the fourth quarter of 2022, but the fact that it didn’t contract either can be seen as a positive, as it means that the country didn’t suffer the ignominy of being the only G7 economy to actually suffer a recession.

There have been doubts raised regarding the whole two quarters of negative growth denoting a technical recession and while it may be practical to provide the financial markets with a guide to a nation’s performance, in reality it has no practical meaning.

Judging a country’s performance over a period of two months to decide if it is contracting is an impractical notion. There are so many moving parts that contribute to a recession that simply to say the accepted two quarters of contraction means nothing in the real world.

Two half yeast of negative growth would be a more suitable period over which to judge a country’s performance, but for now, the Government can breathe a sigh of relief that it was enough of a close call to mean that it got away with it.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer commented that while the fact that the country did not suffer a recession in 2022 is welcome, it is not out of the woods yet. There are still hard decisions to be made, inflation is still too high, government borrowing needs to be brought under tighter control, public sector pay deals need to be struck, and output from both manufacturing and services is not where it needs to be.

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