While the prospect of a UK recession is looming once again with the recent hike in interest rates, it appears the country has managed to sidestep it so far.
But is London’s outsized finance-driven economy masking the fact that some British regions have actually been in a recession?
Official estimates of local economic output suggest that may be true. And some economists have been concerned that the UK’s spatially imbalanced economy is not only unhealthy for less wealthy regions but may also spell future stagnation or decline for the UK as a whole.
A recession is commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product (GDP), which measures the total monetary value of all the final goods and services produced in an economy during a time period….