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Research and analysis The UK recession in context 277 The UK recession in context — what do three centuries of data tell us? By Sally Hills and Ryland Thomas of the Bank’s Monetary Assessment and Strategy Division and Nicholas Dimsdale of The Queen’s College, Oxford.(1) The Quarterly Bulletin has a long tradition of using historical data to help analyse the latest developments in the UK economy. To mark the Bulletin’s 50th anniversary, this article places the recent UK recession in a long-run historical context. It draws on the extensive literature on UK economic history and analyses a wide range of macroeconomic and financial data going back to the 18th century. The UK economy has undergone major structural change over this period but such historical comparisons can provide lessons for the current economic situation. Introduction An overview of UK business cycles The UK economy recently suffered its deepest recession since Over the past half century, enormous effort has gone into the 1930s. The recent recession had several defining constructing historical national income data for the characteristics: it took place simultaneously with a global United Kingdom. First, annual GDP estimates were recession; the financial sector was both the source and constructed back to the mid-19th century, based on output, propagator of the crisis; the exchange rate depreciated income and expenditure approaches (Deane and Cole (1962), sharply; and there was a substantial loosening of monetary Deane (1968) and Feinstein (1972)). These were followed by policy alongside a marked increase in the fiscal deficit. But ‘balanced’ estimates of GDP growth