CBI offers fresh warning of recession

Source: Manufacturing Digital

Date :15/09/2008 13:45:21

The CBI has become the latest in a line of organisations to predict that the UK will fall into recession this year.

The business group estimates that the economy will shrink by 0.2 percent between July and September, and then by a future 0.1 percent from October to December.

This follows similar warnings from the European Commission and the British Chambers of Commerce.

Although the CBI predicts two quarters of downturn, it expects a “shallow recession”, not a return to the drawn out economic woes of the early 1990s.

As for 2009, the CBI predicts the UK economy will grow at a rate of 0.3 percent - the worst performance since 1992.

Elsewhere, the latest official data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that the UK economy failed to grow between April and June.

The ONS has also said that UK manufacturing output fell in July for a fifth straight month.