Britain is, of course, in a Brexit-driven recession of its own making, while other EU countries are powering on ahead without us. Or so we keep being told. The ideas is that we are distancing ourselves from European markets – and concerned manufacturers will move production to factories elsewhere in the EU.
While this gloomy analysis appears to be confirmed every time the CBI, IMF and others publish their forecasts, it is becoming increasingly hard to square with the economic data.
This morning, IHS/Markit published its monthly Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for manufacturing – a measure of business activity which leads official government statistics on the economy. The survey takes data on economic activity directly from businesses and boils it down to a single score between 0 and 100, where anything over 50 denotes economic expansion and anything under 50 denotes contraction.
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