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The
Office for National Statistics has been under pressure to use
more of the digital data created by businesses and consumers
which other statistics agencies are streaming into their
measurements of the economy.
The Bank of England is likely to pay attention too, as it is
trying to improve its understanding of early signals coming from
Britain's economy as it navigates Brexit.
"Policymakers and analysts demand faster insight into the state
of the UK economy in order to make informed, timely decisions on
matters such as the setting of interest rates," said Louisa
Nolan, the ONS's lead data scientist.
The ONS said its new indicators would be launched in April and
in many cases they would be available a month earlier than gross
domestic product data, the main measure of how fast an economy
is growing or shrinking.
The ONS cautioned against using the new indicators as predictors
of GDP but said they would be able to identify large changes to
economic activity.
A new VAT index, which will show whether businesses are seeing
more or less turnover, would have spotted the first quarter of
the 2008-09 recession in Britain five months before it showed up
official estimates, although GDP figures have been improved
since then, the ONS said.
There was a "surprisingly good correlation" between the ONS's
shipping indicators and imports, while traffic counts for heavy
goods vehicles in England were consistent with at least some
economic events, such as the financial crisis.
The traffic flows numbers might also help to measure how much
Britain's economy can grow without creating excessive inflation
pressure, the ONS said.
(Reporting by William Schomberg, editing by David Milliken)
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