The Easter weekend has traditionally been one of the highlights for retailers with shoppers being enticed to venture out and make the best of the long bank holiday weekend. However, with most non-essential stores still closed, this Easter will test the patience of retailers across the country while garden centres and DIY stores are set

A year ago this week, Cebr closed its office for an indefinite period, in light of the hastening spread of a new coronavirus. Countless workplaces up and down the country did the same. Many were prompted towards mass remote working, while businesses more reliant on face-to-face contact ceased their operations completely. It was clear that

China dominates the world market for most types of electric vehicles. The Chinese stock of electric cars at 4.6 million is 42% of the world’s total. For electric buses the share is even higher at 98%, for vans it’s 65%. Underpinning this is the Chinese production of lithium ion batteries – where 77% of the world’s

The Chancellor stood up this lunchtime with two major tasks: to ensure that the UK economy recovers post Covid and to bring public finances back under control. Despite the record-contraction in GDP in 2020, it was never going to be too difficult to get the economy to bounce back this year as long as vaccination

In the years since Bitcoin first entered the public eye, it has gone from a relatively obscure and fringe cryptocurrency to an increasingly mainstream digital asset. Indeed, it appears that the crypto initially known for its fully anonymous features is in the process of becoming an accepted and legitimate payment method and asset. The price

The coronavirus pandemic has been a challenge for economic forecasters. While we at Cebr have probably fared better than most other forecasters (our March 2020 forecasts revision predicted global output to decline by 4.0% for the year at a time when many of our rivals were still forecasting growth – the latest data suggest the

In Q3 2020, a record 16% expansion in GDP helped push productivity in the UK – as measured by output per hour worked – to the highest it has ever been. Much of this can be attributed to sectoral factors, with traditionally low productivity sectors such as hospitality accounting for a smaller share of the economic

There are two reasons for expecting that the market structure in tech sectors will differ from the model of perfect competition with plentiful companies competing on price, quality and increasingly innovation. First is the economics of information. Once some research has been completed, the costs of replication are very low. So we get what I

Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year points out that: ‘One mischief always introduces another. These terrors and apprehensions of the people led them into a thousand weak, foolish, and wicked things….and this was running about to fortune-tellers, cunning-men, and astrologers to know their fortune’. So much for forecasting. As far as I

Click here to download the full report. Since its first publication in 2009, Cebr’s World Economic League Table (known as the WELT) has established itself as the go to measure of the comparative economic success of different countries. Media of all kinds around the world eagerly await the release of the latest issue every Boxing

Cebr welcomes the announcement of a provisional deal between the UK and the EU to regulate the post Brexit partnership. Obviously this deal remains unratified but we would expect it to be ratified, not necessarily without glitches. We will be examining the details in the coming days and will comment accordingly. As we said in

The full report can be downloaded here Executive Summary Stamp duty has long been a controversial tax. Critics highlight the role of the tax in stifling housing market activity and the seemingly arbitrary penalty it applies to properties that change hands more frequently, while advocates point to the tax’s progressive structure and its role in

In April, Cebr forecast that in Q2, households would accumulate £23 billion more in savings than in a normal year. This note updates our projections, to calculate the total savings amassed by UK households in 2020 as a whole. We find that households will save 19% of their disposable incomes in 2020.[1] This is more

Covid-19 has brought about many difficulties for businesses in the UK. From a loss of demand, to new policies for social distancing, most enterprises have seen their resilience tested and have had to adapt to new ways of working in 2020. This report, for E.ON, measures the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on a range

Like everything else this year, Christmas 2020 will be different. It has been a long and difficult year, and at times it was difficult to see anything but gloom – on people’s faces, in the news headlines, and within economic forecasts. However, a couple of recent developments (end of second lockdown and vaccine approval) have