LONDON: Britain is in recession for the first time since 1991 after its economy shrank during the final two quarters of last year as a global financial crisis raged, official data showed on Friday. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that gross domestic product (GDP) had shrunk by 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared with the previous three-month period, when it contracted by 0.6 percent. The generally used technical definition of a recession is two quarters running of negative economic growth. The figure for the final quarter of 2008 showed the biggest fall in GDP...
photo: AP / Kirsty Wigglesworth
