Brian Green on...

摘要

The annual turnover of the construction industry is about £1.5bn bigger than we thought it was last month and it is growing much faster. That's the big story from the estimate of construction output by the Office for National Statistics last week. This means that the estimate for GDP will be boosted by about 0.1% as a result of the revisions to the construction output data. So we should expect to see the consensus forecast for GDP growth in 2013 rise from 1.4% to 1.5%, all other things being equal. The reasons for the upward revisions, which added about £2bn to the volume measure of work done by construction firms over the past seven quarters, are broadly down to late data, revised seasonal adjustments and, it seems, some changes to how inflation is measured.