UK economy boosted by manufacturing sector upturn

Britain’s manufacturing sector experienced its first period of expansion for more than a year over the month of July, a new study has revealed.

Adding weight to claims that the worst could be over for the UK economy, the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) said that the level of new orders received last month was the highest since November 2007.

This helped push the CIPS monthly index over the 50-point mark, which is used to divide contraction and growth, for the first time since March 2008, with purchasing managers now believed to be making up for cutting back on their inventories in the early days of the economic downturn.

Welcoming the figures, David Noble, chief executive of CIPS said: ’The manufacturing sector has clearly pulled out of the nosedive it was in earlier this year and is no longer plummeting.’

At the same time, the statistics also show a slowdown in the rate of job cuts within the manufacturing sector, again lending support to claims that the economy is picking up again.

This comes soon after a Bloomberg survey revealed that economists predicted that the CIPS index would return a result of just 47.5.
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