Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a program that examines

and unravels the numbers that underpin the world, and I'm Tim Harford.

There's no doubt that the pandemic has caused a global economic crisis, as well as a public

health crisis, but the impact has varied around the world.

The most straightforward way to measure an economic hit is by looking at GDP, Ghost Domestic

Product. You can measure GDP by adding up everyone's income or everyone's spending, or

the market value of everything that's been produced, and in principle all three methods produce

the same number. In a typical recession, GDP falls by a percentage point or three, but during

the height of the first lockdown, the second quarter of last year, GDP dropped by nearly 14%

in France, 7% in Denmark, 19% in Spain, economic catastrophe. But one country's economy seems

to have performed worse than almost anywhere else, the UK's. In the same period, its GDP fell

by about 20%. I spoke to Simon Brisco, director of the Data Science Company, the Data Analysis Bureau.

Firstly, it can be put down to genuine economic response. Britain has a disproportionately

large service sector, so arts, cultures, entertaining sandwiches, pubs, the whole lot, went into

lockdown so money couldn't be spent. And secondly, there was a particularly large hit from the fall

in what is called government output, primarily schools and hospitals. But hang on, remember that

GDP is supposed to be a measure of the market value of what's produced. Most schools and hospitals

provide free services paid for out of taxes, so that makes calculating their market value and thus

GDP rather tricky. And here, the plot thickens. You mentioned schools are closed, a lot of hospital

operations were stopped. So how does that feed into UK GDP figures? Well, the output of the

government sector in the year to the second quarter of last year fell by 23% in the UK.

Now, there was only France and I think Hungary that fell by more than 10%,

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