Click image for full graphic. These figures, from the IMF, show the GDP for the world's biggest economies. For the biggest of the developed nations, the story of the last century was one of growth, interrupted by the odd global war. This century is already seeing a change, as the new powerhouses of the east rise up the league table. China, India, Brazil - will these be the top countries in a decade's time? The NICE decade that turned nasty. Labour's economic record over the past 13 years is summed up by those six words. NICE, coined by Mervyn King, stood for non-inflationary constant expansion and described the benign environment that Tony Blairinherited in May 1997. Growth was strong, house prices were rising gently, unemployment was falling and the budget deficit was coming down. Labour governments traditionally suffered a financial crisis within two or three years of achieving power, but not this time. The first big decision by Gordon Brown as chancellor in May 1997 was to give the Bank of England operational control over interest rates, and the markets expressed their confidence in the new policy regime by pushing the pound higher on the foreign exchanges. The strength of sterling allowed UK consumers to buy even more of the low-cost goods being churned out by factories in China and the rest of Asia. In turn, keenly-priced imports suppressed inflationary pressures, allowing the Bank to keep interest rates lower than they would otherwise have been. Consumers loaded up on cheap credit made available by a booming City and the property market took off. This all looked too good to be true - and it was. The dark side of a rising pound was that UK exports were priced out of overseas markets. Factory output stagnated and more than a million jobs in manufacturing were lost, exacerbating the North-South divide. Falling claimant count unemployment disguised high levels of ingrained joblessness in Britain's old industrial regions. The trade deficit grew wider year by year. But for 10 years, the weaknesses were kept hidden. Britain's growth rate was more than a match for its major European rivals, and the economy - which had already been picking up steam under John Major's Conservative government - continued to expand for more than 60 consecutive quarters. The problems surfaced almost as soon as Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair in prime minister in the summer of 2007. Northern Rock, which had been offering lenders 125% mortgages, became the first major high street bank in Britain to suffer a bank run since the 1860s. The onset of the credit crunch meant that the two engines of private-sector growth - the City and the housing market - stalled at the same time, dragging the rest of the economy down with them in the longest and deepest recession since the Second World War. The legacy of the crash is a limping economy and the biggest peacetime Government budget deficit in history. • Search the world's government data with our gateway Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr groupor mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk
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Sunday, 25 April 2010
The Guardian's economics editor introduces our economic factile - and the full data behind it
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