Please note, this webinar has been postponed until early 2026. We will update this page once a new date has been confirmed.
Presented by Russell Black, Department for Business and Trade, King’s College London and ESCoE
This webinar presents new research on the quality and consistency of Value Added Tax data to measure economic growth. VAT data is fast and comprehensive, with all UK firms with a turnover of more than £90,000 required to submit information on their turnover and purchases. Theoretically, these are strong advantages over smaller survey data sources, and place no additional reporting burden on business, as the data has to be collected for tax purposes anyway. VAT turnover data is currently used in UK GDP output measures alongside other data sources.
The findings presented in this webinar combine firm-level VAT turnover and expenditure to create new estimates of firm-level GVA for all UK firms above the VAT threshold. While there are advantages in speed, there are disadvantages in noise and bias. One valuable aspect of comprehensive administrative data is the ability to follow firms over time, allowing the decompositions productivity growth into aggregate contributions from within-firm productivity growth, and the contributions from reallocation of workers across firms, changing the composition of firms in the economy. Initial findings from the VAT-based estimates show that reallocation was a more important margin of growth in the Great Financial Crisis 2008-2010, and comparatively less important in the Covid recession. Between 2019 and 2024, within-firm growth provides the majority aggregate productivity growth – the same firms are the same sizes, but have grown their productivity in the interval, and growth due to net entry and reallocation across firms is relatively smaller.
Presenter bio
Russell is a part-time PhD student in Economics at King’s Business School, researching topics around productivity growth. Russell works at the Department for Business and Trade.
Chair: Peter Levell, Institute for Fiscal Studies and ESCoE
Discussant: Nick Vaughan, ONS