BCC Projected an 'underwhelming' Economy for UK

The Great Britain failed to have an impressive an economy in 2018 based on a major poll on Wednesday, which indicated that various firms are currently in a controlled tone in advance of the Brexit. According to the Quarterly Economic Survey by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), businesses continued to deal with cost pressures since the last quarter of 2017 and remained uncertain to for further investments. The BCC showed that the services sector keep on rising in a restrained manner. On one side, the manufacturers have better performance than the service industry but continuously decrease gradually on both sales of domestic and exports.

Generally, the survey presented that the UK economy had a moderate growth as 2017 ends after the slight increase in three months to September which shows quarterly growth of 0.4 percent or below the previous trend of 0.6 percent. While economists polled by Reuters believe that the United Kingdom will surge in 2018, beating its rivals and exceed the projected performance during the time of Brexit in mid-2016. The survey includes 7,000 companies and the largest company reported that the volume of services companies claimed that recruitment issues boosted to  71 percent, which is the highest figure since 1989.

The BCC stated that this could possibly be the biggest decline on businesses for this year and suggested its members to train additional workers instead of complaining about staff shortages. More than a third of services firms predicted to raise prices for the subsequent quarter and the most since late 2008. This brought concerns for the officials of the Bank of England, considering the fact that the BCC measures accurately the producer prices that gives future references for inflation pressure despite previous accounts showed skills shortages did not help to have a faster wage increase.

On December last year, the BoE stated that inflation would likely decelerate slowly this year. The consumer price inflation surge to  3.1 percent, its highest level after almost six years in November. The central bank also predicted for an expansion in business investment this year. However, the BCC poll did not indicate any hints for a strong uptrend in investment plans among manufacturing or services companies, which is not different from the survey of Deloitte to major company bosses to be released this week.

Meanwhile, the official statistics of industrial, construction and trade data in November are scheduled at 0930 GMT.