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RECONCILED ESTIMATES AND NOWCASTS OF REGIONAL OUTPUT IN THE UK

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2020

Gary Koop ,
Stuart McIntyre ,
James Mitchell  and
Aubrey Poon
Gary Koop
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyde, Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, e-mails: gary.koop@strath.ac.uk, s.mcintyre@strath.ac.uk and aubrey.poon@strath.ac.uk.
Stuart McIntyre
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyde, Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, e-mails: gary.koop@strath.ac.uk, s.mcintyre@strath.ac.uk and aubrey.poon@strath.ac.uk.
James Mitchell
Affiliation:
Warwick Business School, Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, e-mail: james.mitchell@wbs.ac.uk.
Aubrey Poon
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyde, Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, e-mails: gary.koop@strath.ac.uk, s.mcintyre@strath.ac.uk and aubrey.poon@strath.ac.uk.
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Abstract

There is renewed interest in levelling up the regions of the UK. The combination of social and political discontent, and the sluggishness of key UK macroeconomic indicators like productivity growth, has led to increased interest in understanding the regional economies of the UK. In turn, this has led to more investment in economic statistics. Specifically, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) recently started to produce quarterly regional GDP data for the nine English regions and Wales that date back to 2012Q1. This complements existing real GVA data for the regions available from the ONS on an annual basis back to 1998; with the devolved administrations of Scotland and Northern Ireland producing their own quarterly output measures. In this paper we reconcile these two data sources along with UK quarterly output data that date back to 1970. This enables us to produce both more timely real terms estimates of quarterly economic growth in the regions of the UK and a new reconciled historical time-series of quarterly regional real output data from 1970. We explore a number of features of interest of these new data. This includes producing a new quarterly regional productivity series and commenting on the evolution of regional productivity growth in the UK.

Keywords

Bayesian methodsMixed frequencyRegional nowcastingVector auto-regressionsregional productivityregional economicsC11C53O4R1
Type
Research Article
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 253 , August 2020 , pp. R44 - R59
Copyright
© National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2020

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Footnotes

This research has been funded by the ONS as part of the research programme of the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE).

References

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