Bosses at Britain’s services firms are feeling chipper, judging by the latest purchasing managers index survey – in sharp contrast to industrialists, who were markedly downbeat in their own edition of the survey last week.
Such snapshots do not necessarily have much predictive power; but they do gauge a sector’s general mood. And it is not surprising it’s the services firms that are looking forward with optimism.
As the Office for National Statistics’ latest economic review – based on actual output data, not survey responses – points out, construction and manufacturing have never recovered from the deep recession in 2008, when output “fell off a cliff”, as it was frequently described at the time.
