NIESR forecasts 2% mom UK GDP in April, and 4.7% qoq growth in Q2. This is likely to be driven by the retail and hospitality sectors. For the full year 2021, it expects 5.7% growth, driven by strong consumer spending.
“A contraction of 1.5 per cent is in line with our forecast for the first quarter of the year, underlining the extent to which the economy has adapted to deal with the latest national lockdown. This has provided a better start to 2021 than anticipated at the beginning of the year and we expect it to contribute to a strong rebound in the second quarter as the economy opens up, consistent with our year-on-year growth forecast of 5.7 per cent in 2021. As expected with many children returning to school, the education sector provided a large contribution to growth in March. There were also significant contributions from the retail sector, from construction and from testing and vaccination programmes in the health and social care sector.” Rory Macqueen Principal Economist – Macroeconomic Modelling and Forecasting
