Yesterday, the ONS released its annual revisions of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) covering the period up to 2022.

The statistics authority upgraded their estimate for GDP growth for 2022 rise from 4.3% to 4.8%, which is a little larger than usual.

The ONS said this reflects the more comprehensive annual survey responses – that take a while to collect and process. Nevertheless, the figures show that the economy did better than its initial estimates suggested, as well as the sizeable changes in the way the economy now operates since the COVID-19 pandemic.

If the revisions are compared as a proportion of growth in the relevant year, the revision in 2022 is only slightly larger than the historical average. In addition, the ONS has updated its assumptions about the ‘weight’ it gives each industry within GDP for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. While the ONS usually updates these annually, using weights for the pandemic years when much of the economy was closed or operating very differently, would have skewed its overall estimates.

International guidance from the IMF at the time noted this challenge and recommended pausing weighting updates until activity had settled into a post-COVID norm. While the UK generally updates the weights on an annual basis, other countries can take up to five years to make these changes, which need to be considered when making international comparisons.

So the ONS has now updated the weights for the first time since 2019, which has had a notable impact on its estimates, given the significant changes to how the economy has operated due to both the pandemic and the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

For example, the ONS has seen big rises in the weight of mining and quarrying – given the large increase in gas and oil prices, and this sector is now larger in 2022 relative to other sectors.

In addition, the health sector, which increased its share of economic activity a lot during the pandemic, remains larger in 2022 than its long-term average as the sector catches up post-pandemic.

Conversely, manufacturing, which is now seeing significantly increased costs and therefore adding less to the economy overall, and the accommodation and food sector, which was hit hard in the pandemic and has still not returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2022, are both relatively smaller than they were in 2019.