Measuring Financial Sector Output and its Contribution to UK GDP

Abstract

In the decade before the financial crisis, the UK financial services sector grew more than twice as fast as the UK economy as a whole. But there are many conceptual difficulties associated with measuring output in finance. This article describes the contribution of the financial sector to GDP and assesses the uncertainty around recent estimates. There is some evidence that financial services output grew less quickly over the recent past than the official data suggest, although this probably had only a small impact on the rate of growth of overall GDP.