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Comment by vikingerik | Hacker News Reader

Be warned that every year-over-year number still needs to consider the effects from the pandemic. The UK will seem to look bad in 2023 because they recovered well in 2022 so the year-over-year baseline is artificially high. Countries like Canada and Japan that still had some pandemic restrictions dragging down 2022 are the ones who will look good for 2023 over an artificially low baseline. Both of those are an illusion of time-shifting, displacing economic activity and demand from one year into another.

For real numbers, compare 2023 to 2019 and see what it looks like for a four-year time span. That's your real numbers here.

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Even discounting annual variance, the UK economy has been performing very poorly since, at least, 2010.

> The UK economy is in the doldrums. The IMF has forecast it will be the worst-performing large advanced economy this year. But the problems stretch back much further.

> Average annual growth rates have more than halved since the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The UK economy is no bigger now than it was on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic at the end of 2019 and the Bank of England does not expect to recover that ground until 2026 at the earliest.

https://www.ft.com/content/dd195cda-ca12-48a6-9e8b-65a36e4e7...

That’s true of every big European country except Germany. The UK, Italy, France, and Spain (four of the five largest countries in Europe) have basically the same GDP now as in 2008.

Germany is screwed too, they lost access to cheap Russian gas, the auto market is changing, car exports account for 40% of their GDP. Companies like Daimler, the Vag group or BMW should really begin to target the defence sector.

The U.K. had a lost decade from the Great Recession to present [0][1]. There was a slight uptick in the 2017-19 period and in 2022 but a lot of that was lost due to covid and political instability respectively.

[0] - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2022/02/10/understanding-...

[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/7968048a-3f7f-4cb0-8fa1-e10aff14b...

Ah yes, nothing to do with self-inflicted sanctions...

It doesn't appear to be? Or at-least plenty of the EU managed to do just as poorly without leaving?

No? British GDP is 0.8% lower than pre-pandemic, Eurozone 2.4% higher.

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN02...

"plenty of the EU" != Eurozone

Well, the whole EU did better than just the Eurozone, 2.8% GDP growth compared to pre-pandemic:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/16249744/2-0...

I'm trying to avoid accusing you of intentional misinterpreting my statements but you continue to try and use the whole EU or other groupings of counties to compare against the UK instead of against other individual nations that remained inside the EU which I very clearly stated.

It’s just an illusion. Keep moving.

Your contention is that any and all poor performance is due to the pandemic, not in any way related to Brexit?

I'm not sure 2022 looks quite as good as you're suggesting, but it's clear the pandemic had a profound impact, certainly.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/19/britain-eco...

> Your contention is that any and all poor performance is due to the pandemic, not in any way related to Brexit?

Your interpretation of the parent post is mistaken. They are saying that if you wish to try to isolate the effects of Brexit from the effects of the pandemic (and the recovery) in your analysis you should compare 4 years' data.

I'm not sure the initial comment lends itself to that reading, but it isn't clear it lends itself to my initial response either, so I'll switch over to your more charitable reading. Thanks!

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