First the good news. Unlike the IMF, which predicted in January that the UK economy would have a worse 2023 than even Russia, the OECD’s latest forecast has Britain outperforming Russia. Now the bad news: the OECD still predicts the UK to perform worse than any European country other than Russia.

Forecasts aside, the actual data for the UK economy is a slightly improving story

Its latest bulletin, published this morning, sees Britain shrinking by 0.2 per cent in 2023, compared with growth of 0.3 per cent for Germany, 0.7 per cent for France and 0.8 per cent for the Euro area as a whole. The Russian economy, by the way, is expected to shrink by 2.5 per cent.

Why the negative outlook for the UK? The latest OECD report offers no specific analysis of the UK, although last autumn, when the organisation was predicting a slightly sharper contraction of 0.4 per cent in the UK economy over 2023, it spoke of falling consumer demand due to rising living costs, along with labour and good supply shortages.

If Britain does go on to under-perform in 2023 compared to the rest of Europe, however, it needs to be seen in the context of a relatively good 2022. The UK economy grew by 4.0 per cent in 2022 (entirely in the first half of the year), compared with 1.9 per cent for Germany, 2.6 per cent for France and 3.5 per cent for the Eurozone as a whole.

Looking ahead to 2024, the OECD expects the UK to continue to underperform the rest of Europe, growing by 0.9 per cent compared with 1.7 per cent for Germany, 1.3 per cent for France and 1.4 per cent for the Eurozone as a whole. Britain’s predicted performance for 2024 does represent an upgrade from the OECD, however – last autumn it was predicting only 0.2 per cent growth in 2024.

The OECD is still erring on the negative side compared with the OBR, however – which, as Jeremy Hunt mentioned in his Budget speech on Wednesday, now expects Britain to avoid a technical recession in 2023.

Should we take notice of any of this? Economic forecasting has such a lousy record that it is tempting to ignore anything the OECD or IMF say, or the OBR for that matter. It is instructive to look back at what the OECD was saying about Britain a year ago. For once, I am delighted to say, its forecast was not far off. In March 2022 it predicted that growth for 2022 as a whole would be 3.6 per cent (a little lower than the 4.0 per cent out-turn). It also predicted that inflation would peak at over 10 per cent in the autumn – which was in line with what actually happened.

Not, however, that I would bet on the OECD being right two years in a row. Forecasts aside, the actual data for the UK economy is a slightly improving story – with recession avoided, for now, and with inflation appearing to have peaked. But the wider picture is still of a country stuck deep in a trap of low productivity and low growth. It is far from clear how that can be remedied.