In March I reviewed figures from the World Bank which showed that Britain’s economic performance since 2008 was markedly worse than many other countries. Since then the Bank has published figures for 2012 and I can update the table. Here it is. I have taken 2008 as the base year and the countries are ranked in the order of how Gross National Income per capita has developed since then.
| 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | |
| Australia | 100 | 103.47 | 109.79 | 117.65 | 141.9 |
| Canada | 100 | 96.39 | 99.52 | 104.83 | 117.28 |
| Sweden | 100 | 93.2 | 96.93 | 101.45 | 105.48 |
| United States | 100 | 95.95 | 98.89 | 101.52 | 104.66 |
| Germany | 100 | 100.16 | 101.91 | 104.24 | 103.63 |
| Denmark | 100 | 98.83 | 100.93 | 101.83 | 101.24 |
| Belgium | 100 | 98.96 | 101.79 | 101.79 | 99.58 |
| France | 100 | 101.05 | 100.6 | 101.14 | 99.55 |
| Finland | 100 | 97.04 | 98.27 | 99.6 | 97.87 |
| Netherlands | 100 | 99.53 | 99.51 | 101.7 | 96.85 |
| Italy | 100 | 99.47 | 99.41 | 98.69 | 94.63 |
| Spain | 100 | 100.91 | 98.74 | 96.99 | 94.54 |
| Greece | 100 | 103.55 | 97.45 | 90.4 | 85.89 |
| United Kingdom | 100 | 90.2 | 84.09 | 82.8 | 83.7 |
The countries at the bottom of the table have had three successive years of declining output, but even with that they haven’t dug a hole as big as Britain’s. This, then, is what George Osborne’s much vaunted recovery amounts to: if things carry on like this, we might hope in due course to match, or even to better, the economic performance of Greece.