The preliminary official data on gross domestic product (GDP) for the fourth quarter of 2009, show a rise of 0.1 percentage point. This signals a return to growth for the UK economy, and consequently confirms the end of the recession.

This is the first positive reading since the first quarter of 2008, and follows six successive quarters of negative GDP growth: the longest period of recession on record (external website).

The return to economic growth will please the legions of professional economic commentators wrong-footed by the failure of the estimates for the third quarter of 2009 to signal an end to the recession when they were published in October 2009.

However, things are unlikely to go back to how they were prior to the recession. In a speech last week, Bank of England governor Mervyn King remarked (PDF format, 47K) (external website):

The world economy is now coming out of recession. [...] But there is a long period of healing ahead [... and] unemployment is likely to remain high.

Indeed, the risk remains that renewed but frail economic growth could go into reverse, giving rise to a double-dip recession. Writing in the New Statesman earlier this month, economist and former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) member David Blanchflower takes a measured view of the outlook for the UK economy (external website), and judges that rising unemployment and a double-dip recession represent a distinct and interlinked possibility. According to Blanchflower:

[T]here is probably quite a lot more pain to come on the jobs front when the fiscal stimulus is removed. I hope I am wrong. In his New Year message, the director general of the CBI, Richard Lambert, noted that many businesses are still worried about the possibility of a double-dip recession and what that would mean for jobs. So am I.