The British economy is stabilizing, but growth will not return until the beginning of next year and will then be slow, the country’s leading business lobby group said yesterday.
In its latest forecast, the CBI said GDP would likely flatten out during the second half of this year.
“The UK economy is stabilizing, with the worst of the quarterly falls in GDP behind us, but it will take until the beginning of next year before we see a return to growth,” it said, adding that growth would be “modest.”
It said the economy would retract by 0.1 percent in the third quarter of this year, zero percent in the fourth and grow by 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent in the first two quarters of next year.
“The return to growth is likely to be a slow and gradual one; difficult credit conditions are still affecting business behavior,” CBI director general Richard Lambert said.
He said that some analysts had begun to speak of “green shoots” in the recession-hit economy, including the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which said that GDP grew in April, but expressed caution.
“It will take some time before we can be sure these shoots have roots we can depend on for sustainable growth and, in the meantime, the government must do everything it can to help firms get access to credit,” he said.
The CBI forecast that by the end of the recession, the UK’s economy would have shrunk by a cumulative 4.8 percent, including 3.9 percent this year, after five successive quarters of retraction.
This was not as severe as the recession of the early 1980s, when GDP fell by a cumulative 5.9 percent, it said, and predicted growth of 0.7 percent next year.
The group said Britain’s labor market was proving to be “even more flexible than hoped,” with private sector employees accepting wage freezes and short-time working and said this would limit job losses this year.
Yet unemployment is still likely to continue rising to a peak of 3.03 million or 9.6 percent in the second quarter of next year.
A subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company that has lost control of two critical ports on the Panama Canal said it is seeking US$2 billion of compensation in damages from Panama over its “illegal” takeover of the ports. Panama Ports Co, a unit of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings (長江和記實業), on Friday said in a statement that it is demanding the sum under international arbitration proceedings that it had already started. The Panamanian government last week seized control of the Balboa and Cristobal ports on each end of the Panama Canal, after the country’s Supreme Court declared earlier that a concession allowing
DETERRENCE: With 1,000 indigenous Hsiung Feng II and III missiles and 400 Harpoon missiles, the nation would boast the highest anti-ship missile density in the world With Taiwan wrapping up mass production of Hsiung Feng II and III missiles by December and an influx of Harpoon missiles from the US, Taiwan would have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world, a source said yesterday. Taiwan is to wrap up mass production of the indigenous anti-ship missiles by the end of year, as the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has been meeting production targets ahead of schedule, a defense official with knowledge of the matter said. Combined with the 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles Taiwan expects to receive from the US by 2028, the nation would have
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
RSS