The economy will contract by 2.6 per cent in 2020 if the government gets on top of the crisis over the coming weeks and slump by 5.4 per cent if the pandemic persists through the summer.
The latest KPMG quarterly economic outlook has found that the economy has already stalled with the events of the last few weeks.
Yael Selfin, KPMG UK’s chief economist, said: “The Covid-19 pandemic is first and foremost a human crisis. But there will also be a very substantial negative impact on the global economy and the UK’s economic performance this year and potentially next. Until we know how and when the Covid-19 outbreak will end, the scale of the negative economic impact will be difficult to quantify.
