The British economy experienced its worst recession in 300 years in 2020. Bloomberg reports this with reference to data from the Bank of England, the British Budget Office and the National Statistics Office.
The economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic is the worst for the kingdom since 1709. The Bank of England expects the country’s GDP to contract again in the first quarter of 2021. However, then, thanks to the massive coronavirus vaccinations, the British economy will begin to recover at a strong pace.
Earlier, the Bank of England announced that at the end of 2020, the country’s GDP fell by 9.9 percent. The fall was deeper than economists expected. In their opinion, the British economy should have contracted by 8 percent for the year.
The last time UK GDP fell this much was in 1709, when the economy contracted 13.4 percent. The reasons were the War of the Spanish Succession, as well as the ultra-cold winter of 1708-1709, which became the harshest in Europe over the past 500 years. In 1945 – the year that World War II ended – the UK economy fell 4.6 percent. In 2009, during the global financial crisis, it fell by 4.1 percent, according to data collected by Bloomberg.