Interest rate spread and real activity: evidence for the UK

Results of recent studies for the USA, Canada and Australia have suggested that the term structure of interest rates contains predictive power for real GDP growth, and that this result is robust to the inclusion of additional variables, such as stock market indicators and lagged growth rates. Using a k-quarter growth rate model this paper attempts to ascertain whether similar results are obtained for the UK. In short, the results suggested here state that although the interest rate spread between the 10-year government bond and the 3-month T-bill contains some predictive power for UK output growth, it is less than reported for other countries. Finally, this result is robust to the inclusion of lagged growth and the FT-ALL index return, the latter leading to a marginal improvement in predictive power.