With the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in the late Summer of 2007, the United Kingdom was one of the first countries to experience financial panic after the United States. In September 2007, the bank Northern Rock became the UK's first bank to collapse in 150 years due to a bank run, as depositors reacted to the announcement that the bank would be seeking emergency liquidity support from the Bank of England by lining up outside their bank branches to withdraw money. The failure of Northern Rock was a bad omen for the UK economy and financial sector, as banks stopped lending to each other and to customers in what became known as the 'credit crunch'. Government bailouts, private bailouts By October 2008, many UK banks were facing a situation where if they did not receive external assistance, then they would have to default on their debts and likely have to declare bankruptcy. The UK's Labour government, led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, announced that it would provide emergency funds to stabilize the banking system, leading to the part or full nationalization of some of Britain's largest financial firms. Specifically, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, and HBOS received over 35 billion pounds in a government cash injection, while Barclays opted to seek investment from private investors in order to avoid nationalization, much of which came from the state of Qatar. The bailouts caused UK government debt ratios to almost double over the period of the crisis, while public trust in the financial system sank.

With the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the subsequent financial crisis on Wall Street in 2007 and 2008, economies across the globe began to enter into deep recessions. What had started out as a crisis centered on the United States quickly became global in nature, as it became apparent that not only had the economies of other advanced countries (grouped together as the G7) become intimately tied to the U.S. financial system, but that many of them had experienced housing and asset price bubbles similar to that in the U.S.. The United Kingdom had experienced a huge inflation of housing prices since the 1990s, while Eurozone members (such as Germany, France and Italy) had financial sectors which had become involved in reckless lending to economies on the periphery of the EU, such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Other countries, such as Japan, were hit heavily due their export-led growth models which suffered from the decline in international trade. Unemployment during the Great Recession As business and consumer confidence crashed, credit markets froze, and international trade contracted, the unemployment rate in the most advanced economies shot up. While four to five percent is generally considered to be a healthy unemployment rate, nearing full employment in the economy (when any remaining unemployment is not related to a lack of consumer demand), many of these countries experienced rates at least double that, with unemployment in the United States peaking at almost 10 percent in 2010. In large countries, unemployment rates of this level meant millions or tens of millions of people being out of work, which led to political pressures to stimulate economies and create jobs. By 2012, many of these countries were seeing declining unemployment rates, however, in France and Italy rates of joblessness continued to increase as the Euro crisis took hold. These countries suffered from having a monetary policy which was too tight for their economies (due to the ECB controlling interest rates) and fiscal policy which was constrained by EU debt rules. Left with the option of deregulating their labor markets and pursuing austerity policies, their unemployment rates remained over 10 percent well into the 2010s. Differences in labor markets The differences in unemployment rates at the peak of the crisis (2009-2010) reflect not only the differences in how economies were affected by the downturn, but also the differing labor market institutions and programs in the various countries. Countries with more 'liberalized' labor markets, such as the United States and United Kingdom experienced sharp jumps in their unemployment rate due to the ease at which employers can lay off workers in these countries. When the crisis subsided in these countries, however, their unemployment rates quickly began to drop below those of the other countries, due to their more dynamic labor markets which make it easier to hire workers when the economy is doing well. On the other hand, countries with more 'coordinated' labor market institutions, such as Germany and Japan, experiences lower rates of unemployment during the crisis, as programs such as short-time work, job sharing, and wage restraint agreements were used to keep workers in their jobs. While these countries are less likely to experience spikes in unemployment during crises, the highly regulated nature of their labor markets mean that they are slower to add jobs during periods of economic prosperity.

The gross domestic product of the United Kingdom was around 2.56 trillion British pounds, an increase when compared to the previous year, when UK GDP amounted to about 2.54 trillion pounds. The significant drop in GDP visible in 2020 was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the smaller declines in 2008 and 2009 because of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. Low growth problem in the UK Despite growing by 0.9 percent in 2024, and 0.4 percent in 2023 the UK economy is not that much larger than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since recovering from a huge fall in GDP in the second quarter of 2020, the UK economy has alternated between periods of contraction and low growth, with the UK even in a recession at the end of 2023. While economic growth picked up somewhat in 2024, GDP per capita is lower than it was in 2022, following two years of negative growth. UK's global share of GDP falling As of 2024, the UK had the sixth-largest economy in the world, behind the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and India. Among European nations, this meant that the UK currently has the second-largest economy in Europe, although the economy of France, Europe's third-largest economy, is of a similar size. The UK's global economic ranking will likely fall in the coming years, however, with the UK's share of global GDP expected to fall from 2.16 percent in 2025 to 2.02 percent by 2029.  

This corpus is part of my PhD project entitled 'Constrained Partisanship: A Comparative Study of Policy Choices and Party Discourses in the British and Spanish Crisis Experiences (2008-2014)'. The dataset contains transcripts of 45 speeches and parliamentary interventions on macroeconomic policy from government leaders in Spain and the United Kingdom between 2008 and 2014. This bilingual corpus (in English and Spanish) has been manually compiled from publicly available sources: websites of national parliaments, official government sites, research databases and party websites. All documents are available in open file format.

The corpus as a whole is shared under a CC BY licence but the dataset contains individual publicly available political speeches that are released under their own licences and have their own copyright holders. If reusing any of the individual political speeches then please refer to the original source and licence information as outlined in the file 'PIQUER_Corpus description.csv', paying particular attention to the information in the following columns: 'Original source' and 'Licence'.

During the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the advanced economies of the G7 experienced a period of acute financial crises, downturns in the non-financial economy, and political instability. The governments of these countries in many cases stepped in to backstop their financial sectors and to try to stimulate their economies. The scale of these interventions was large by historical standards, with observers making comparisons to the measures of the New Deal which the U.S. undertook in the 1930s to end the Great Depression.

The bailouts of financial institutions and stimulus packages caused the government debt ratios of the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan in particular to rise sharply. The UK's government debt ratio almost doubled due to the bailouts of Northern Rock and Royal Bank of Scotland. On the other hand, the increases in government debt in the Eurozone were more measured, due to the comparative absence of stimulus spending in these countries. They would later be hit hard during the Eurozone crisis of the 2010s, when bank lending to the periphery of the Eurozone (Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Greece in particular) would trigger a sovereign debt crisis. The Canadian government, led by a Conservative premier, engaged in some fiscal stimulus to support its economy, but these packages were small in comparison to that in most other of the G7 countries.

We examine the effect of the 2008 economic recession on consumers’ observed expenditures for eco-labelled grocery products. Traditional price theory predicts that consumers change their spending during an economic downturn and we would expect the sales share of eco-labelled products to fall since these are relatively more expensive than non-labelled products. We use supermarket loyalty card data from the UK and show that the recession had widely different effects on the expenditure share of different eco-labelled grocery products. We confirm, empirically, that expenditure shares on organic products declined over the time period under study but the expenditures share for fair-trade products increased over the same period. We evaluate alternative models of decision making to explain our results, viz., a salience model and a model of reputation signalling. We find that both of these models give a plausible explanation of our empirical results.

This statistic depicts the behavior of UK shoppers since the 2008 economic recession in the United Kingdom. Of respondents, 46 percent have been cutting back since the downturn and 69 percent will continue to do so.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

This is a qualitative data collection. To understand the processes and motivations behind changes in labour market behaviour during periods of economic recession, this research project recorded the experiences and views of couple-households exposed to job loss in the Great Recession. Conducted as part of a larger ESRC-funded quantitative project, qualitative interviews were carried out with a purposive sample derived from the Understanding Society Innovation Panel. (The Understanding Society Innovation Panel is an annual panel survey that collects a wide range of information about the economic and social circumstances of those living in 1500 households across Britain.) Using the wealth of longitudinal information in the Understanding Society Innovation Panel, a sampling frame of approximately 150 couple households was identified where someone had either lost their job or was working reduced hours in the period 2008 to 2011. A carefully selected sample of 17 households were followed up and in-depth interviews were conducted with the couple-member who had experienced job loss and, where possible, their partner. The selection process was designed to assemble a sample reflecting a diverse range of household and family profiles; namely, couples with and without children, older and younger children; the pre-retirement phase; a range of incomes; and labour market areas across England more and less affected by the recession. Wherever feasible, partners were interviewed separately to allow each participant the opportunity to express their personal views most freely. Overall this led to 30 interviews, each of about 45 minutes in length. Fieldwork took place between October 2012 and February 2013 and consent was obtained verbally. The research design incorporates the ability to link the interview transcripts to Understanding Society Innovation Panel survey data for future combined analysis of qualitative and quantitative material, subject to Special Licence.


Main Topics:

Topics covered in the in-depth interviews include: contextual details surrounding the job loss event, the extent to which job loss was anticipated, change and continuities in joint labour supply (including the division of domestic labour), consumption and expenditure practices, decision making processes and intra-household bargaining, job seeking behaviour, the use of social networks, outlook and expectations for the future.

Interview transcripts with a sample of advanced manufacturing firms(aerospace, electrical, pharmaceutical and automotive sectors), and related policy and business organisations, in the East Midlands, North West and Central Belt of Scotland. The results of a firm questionnaire survey with advanced manufacturing firms (aerospace, electrical, pharmaceutical and automotive sectors) in British manufacturing areas.

The recession from 2008, and the persistent sectoral and spatial imbalances in the recovery, have provoked political calls to 'rebalance' the economy. According to Government representatives, Britain needs to 'reindustrialise', to rediscover its talent for manufacturing. Strengthening manufacturing in the Midlands and North will aid economic stability, raise productivity, and promote a more even distribution of growth. It has been argued that traditional industrial regions should develop new types of high-technology, 'advanced' manufacturing activities.

Such calls for rebalancing have triggered a major debate on whether the British economy can in any way 're-industrialise'. Optimists point to resurgent clusters of manufacturing industries. Others are sceptical and argue that British manufacturing has been undermined by the 2008 recession, long-term weaknesses and an unsupportive institutional context. In this view, supply chains in British manufacturing are now too thin, fragmented and sparse to support industrial renewal on the scale required. There is evidence to show uneven regional trends in manufacturing, especially between the North and South of Britain and, according to some, advanced manufacturing is growing at a much faster rate in Southern England due to its research intensity and proximity to high-technology institutions. There is a pressing need to know how, and how far, industrial regions in Britain are developing advanced manufacturing.

Relatively little is known about any potential regional manufacturing renaissance and the significance of location. There are several hypotheses. Some argue that advanced manufacturing develops best in specialised clusters and in local 'ecosystems' in which firms benefit from shared capabilities, resources, spill-overs and intermediaries. Others emphasise broader-scale external economies across sectors, so that location in cities and regions with a wide range of growing industries is more important to manufacturing performance. There is also debate about the degree to which location in traditional industrial regions aids or hinders advanced manufacturing. In a 'phoenix industry' view, manufacturing can be revived in traditional industrial regions by networks of small firms and by the diversification and branching of new sectors. This project tackles these questions. It places the performance of advanced manufacturing firms in the context of changes in supply chains and examines whether there is increasing specialisation of regions and locations in particular tasks, roles and functions rather than in entire industries.

This project will examine the geographical, organisational and economic dynamics of four key manufacturing industries: electrical, computing and optical equipment; aerospace; pharmaceuticals; and motor vehicles. The project would proceed in three connected stages. The first stage would be to use and combine existing micro-data sources to examine the central issues on the relationships between manufacturing performance and location and investigate the key determinants of firm growth, performance and innovation in these industries. The project will use and combine several data-sets to provide a detailed analysis of change since the early 1970s. The second stage of the project will carry out a postal and online survey of firms in the four industries. This will explore the relationships between location and firm performance in more depth. For each industry, the survey aims to compare a set of firms within traditional industrial regions (in the North, Wales, Scotland or Midlands) with a similar group of firms in Southern regions. The final stage of the project will focus on manufacturers in these industries in four Midlands/Northern regions (selecting one region where each industry is well represented). In these areas, it will use firm interviews and focus groups to discuss findings, and identify and sound out key policy lessons and implications

Two years after the UK recession ended in the final quarter of 2009, came a decrease in GDP in the final quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012, signifying an official “double dip” recession. This Update looks at key labour market indicators since the beginning of the recession period in 2008. It presents the latest national and London figures of those claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance (JSA), known as the claimant count, and also shows the official unemployment measure: the International Labour Organisation (ILO) definition, which is derived from the Labour Force Survey. It gives some detail on the geography and characteristics of those looking for work. In addition, it gives figures for employment levels.

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One of the major duties the Bank of England (BoE) is tasked with is keeping inflation rates low and stable. The usual tactic for keeping inflation rates down, and therefore the price of goods and services stable by the Bank of England is through lowering the Bank Rate. Such a measure was used in 2008 during the global recession when the BoE lowered the bank base rate from **** percent to *** percent. Due to the economic fears surrounding the COVID-19 virus, as of the 19th of March 2020, the bank base rate was set to its lowest ever standing. The issue with lowering interest rates is that there is an end limit as to how low they can go. Quantitative easing Quantitative easing is a measure that central banks can use to inject money into the economy to hopefully boost spending and investment. Quantitative easing is the creation of digital money in order to purchase government bonds. By purchasing large amounts of government bonds, the interest rates on those bonds lower. This in turn means that the interest rates offered on loans for the purchasing of mortgages or business loans also lowers, encouraging spending and stimulating the economy. Large enterprises jump at the opportunity After the initial stimulus of *** billion British pounds through quantitative easing in March 2020, the Bank of England announced in June that they would increase the amount by a further 100 billion British pounds. In March of 2020, the headline flow of borrowing by non-financial industries including construction, transport, real estate and the manufacturing sectors increased significantly.

The United Kingdom's economy grew by 1.1 percent in 2024, after a growth rate of 0.4 percent in 2023, 4.8 percent in 2022, 8.6 percent in 2021, and a record 10.3 percent fall in 2020. During the provided time period, the biggest annual fall in gross domestic product before 2020 occurred in 2009, when the UK economy contracted by 4.6 percent at the height of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. Before 2021, the year with the highest annual GDP growth rate was 1973, when the UK economy grew by 6.5 percent. UK economy growing but GDP per capita falling In 2022, the UK's GDP per capita amounted to approximately 37,371 pounds, with this falling to 37,028 pounds in 2023, and 36,977 pounds in 2024. While the UK economy as a whole grew during this time, the UK's population grew at a faster rate, resulting in the negative growth in GDP per capita. This suggests the UK economy's struggles with productivity are not only stagnating, but getting worse. The relatively poor economic performance of the UK in recent years has not gone unnoticed by the electorate, with the economy consistently seen as the most important issue for voters since 2022. Recent shocks to UK economy In the second quarter of 2020, the UK economy shrank by a record 20.3 percent at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there was a relatively swift economic recovery initially, the economy has struggled to grow much beyond its pre-pandemic size, and was only around 3.1 percent larger in December 2024, when compared with December 2019. Although the labor market has generally been quite resilient during this time, a long twenty-month period between 2021 and 2023 saw prices rise faster than wages, and inflation surge to a high of 11.1 percent in October 2022.

This statistic illustrates the change in median annual earnings for adults in the United Kingdom (UK) in 2017 compared with 2008, by age group. In 2017, adults aged 30-39 in 2017 earned 7.2 percent less than people that age in 2008, compared with a drop of 0.7 percent for over 60s. Across all age groups, earnings decreased by a median amount of 3.2 percent.

The United Kingdom contains one of the largest fitness markets in Europe, with a total revenue of about 5.3 billion euros. This statistic shows the number of fitness facility enterprises in the United Kingdom from 2008 to 2018. Since 2012 there has been a consistent increase in the number of fitness facilities in the UK, culminating in 3419 facilities in 2018. Health and Wellbeing This growth is largely driven by increased participation as a result of increasing awareness of the benefits of exercise on both physical and mental health. The rise in obesity, heart disease and diabetes has further highlighted the need to alter sedentary lifestyles, and government initiatives and sporting events have given the industry a further boost, as have technological developments. The Great Recession of 2008 to 2012 The slight decline in the number of fitness facilities observed between 2008 and 2012 could be related to the 2008 global financial crisis, a severe worldwide economic crisis considered by many economists to have been the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The crisis played a significant role in the failure of many businesses and the declines in consumer wealth leading to the Great Recession of 2008 to 2012. The 2012 London Olympics One event that could have played a role in the post-2012 growth of the fitness industry is the London 2012 Olympics. The deliberate marketing and success of the games left a legacy that can be empirically observed throughout many sectors of society. Particularly in relation to increased participation and increased investment within the fitness industry.

This statistic shows total domestic consumption expenditure in the United Kingdom (UK) from 2005 to 2023. In 2023, consumer spending in the UK increased compared to the previous year, and amounted to approximately 1.6 trillion British pounds. Household consumption expenditure looks at the overall spending on consumer goods and services of a wide variety. Some examples are government licenses and permits, such as a passport renewal or the price of train tickets to get to work. Housing may also be accounted for in these figures. This figure is measured by how much the consumer actually pays at the point of sale. All fast moving consumer goods such a beer, or cigarettes are also accounted for in this data. One part of the United Kingdom, Scotland, has seen as increase in its overall household expenditure year over year since 2009, with figures reaching over 100 billion British pounds in 2018. There was a small decrease in expenditure in 2009, which was possibly a result of the economic recession which hit all of the United Kingdom hard at this time. This drop can also be seen when looking at the whole of the United Kingdom in this statistic.

In 2022/23 the median annual household disposable income in the United Kingdom amounted to approximately ****** British pounds. Between 1994/95 and 2007/08 the average household disposable income showed year-on-year increases, but after this point, income levels began to stagnate and even decline in some years. Although average household disposable resumed a steady growth pattern between 2012/13 and 2016/17, it has fluctuated in more recent years, and declined in the most recent two years. Economic shocks and disposable income The steady growth of disposable income from 1994 to 2008 reflected the generally healthy UK economy in that period. After the global financial crisis, however, the UK economy was plunged into a deep recession that is mirrored by a decline in disposable income. Although there was a period of recovery between 2013 and 2016, the UK economy has suffered a series of economic shocks since that point. The Brexit Referendum of 2016, and the subsequent economic and political fallout, was followed by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and in more recent years by the Inflation Crisis and Ukraine War. Living costs putting UK households under pressure Between January and April 2022, the share of people reporting an increase in their living costs compared with the previous month rose from ** percent to ** percent. This corresponded with significant price increases at that time, with CPI inflation surging from *** percent in February 2021 to a **-year-high of **** percent by October 2022. Although inflation did gradually start to decline in the following months, it wasn't until July 2023 that wages caught up with inflation. The surge in energy and food prices that caused this high inflation, was devastating for UK households, leading to the worst Cost of Living Crisis for decades.

The gross domestic product (GDP) of all G7 countries decreased sharply in 2009 and 2020 due to the financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, respectively. The growth decline was heavier after the COVID-19 pandemic than the financial crisis. Moreover, Italy had a negative GDP growth rate in 2012 and 2013 following the euro crisis. In 2023, Germany experienced an economic recession.

This statistic shows the financial investment in mutual fund shares as a percentage of total household financial assets in the United Kingdom (UK) from 2000 to 2015. Over this period of time, investment in mutual fund shares increased to approximately *** percent of all household assets, from the level of *** percent in 2008, at the beginning of the global recession.