Office for Budget Responsibility - Economic and fiscal outlook - March 2023

We have also drawn on the work and expertise of numerous officials across government in preparing these forecasts, including in HM Treasury, HM Revenue and Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the Department for Education, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, the Department for. [...] Outside government we have held useful discussions with the Bank of England, the Confederation of British Industry, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Resolution Foundation, the Institute for Government, the International Monetary Fund, the Health Foundation, Alex Tuckett from the CRU group, and Tony Wilson from the Institute for Employmen. [...] The gap between the two indices is one measure of the reduction in the real purchasing power of UK households due to the increase in the price of goods and services that the UK imports relative to those that we produce domestically. [...] However, in the wake of the pandemic, the participation rate fell by around a percentage point to 63.2 per cent in the final quarter of 2022, undoing almost all of the increase of the preceding decade. [...] The percentage change in the former minus the percentage change in the latter helps determine the percentage change in the relevant inactivity rate (as illustrated in Smith, J.