Is the economy improving?

IT has now become a routine question. Every TV anchor and people I meet in any gathering all want to know: is it true that the economy is ‘improving’? The short, and best, answer here is ‘yes and no’. Yes, because the deficits that plagued it have been plugged. No, because growth remains a far-off dream. The proper term to use is ‘the economy is stabilising’, but it is not yet, and will not be for a long time, ready to grow. This presents a problem. Without growth, you don’t get employment generation to absorb the new entrants to the labour force, of which there are an estimated two million every year. You also don’t get income growth, meaning all the purchasing power that was destroyed in the inflationary fire of 2021 to 2024 will not be recovered. At least not in the near future. But stability means the end of inflation, the plateauing out of prices which had begun to spiral out of control in early 2021 and reached an inferno by 2023.