Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to his oral contribution of 11 January 2021, Official Report column 26, if he will publish the evidence from the Office for Budget Responsibility and Office for National Statistics which found that the UK’s economic performance is in line with comparable countries when corrected for measurement of public sector output.

The UK, along with the rest of the world, continues to face significant economic disruption in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic – no major economy avoided a dramatic fall in GDP earlier in the year.

International comparisons of economic performance are challenging, particularly given the different approaches that countries take to measuring the contribution of public services to GDP. The Office for National Statistics stated in the December Quarterly National Accounts that “international comparisons should be made with care if the estimates being compared are based on different approaches to measuring the volume of non-market output”.

Further, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) set out in their November Economic and Fiscal Outlook that “some countries, including the UK, use direct measures of some public sector output but others assume that it is given by the associated inputs. If the latter approach were still used in the UK, then the fall in GDP the second quarter would have been around 4 percentage points smaller.”

This represents around a fifth of the overall reported fall in UK GDP in the first half of 2020 and, if adjusted for, would leave the UK’s performance over this period closer in line with other advanced economies.