UK avoids recession – but only just

The UK has narrowly avoided a recession, an influential think-tank has predicted, but it warned the economy would remain “depressed” until 2014.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) believes the economy scraped growth of 0.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2012, following a 0.3 per cent fall in the previous three months.

That would mean the UK has dodged another recession – defined as two quarters in a row of declines – disproving a recent gloomier prediction from another think-tank, the OECD, which forecast a 0.1 per cent decline.

But NIESR said the economy would remain “depressed” until 2014, when output would finally reach the pre-recession peak it hit in 2008. That would mean the recovery from recession will take longer than at any time in the past 100 years, including the 1970s or the 1930s.