The pressures on the UK economy from EU referendum jitters and a downturn in global trade will be revealed this week with the publication on Wednesday of official UK growth figures.

Nervous investors and policymakers are also keenly awaiting GDP updates from the US and eurozone to gauge the scale of a global slowdown that has prompted wild swings on stock markets in recent months and warnings from the International Monetary Fund that governments need to step up public investment to avert a slump.

The UK figures are expected to show a marked slowdown in growth after business surveys pointed to companies delaying spending and hiring ahead of the Brexit vote. Official figures showing a drop in retail sales last week suggested consumers, the main drivers of the UK’s post-crisis recovery, were also cutting back as pay growth flatlines and government spending cuts bite.

Economists anticipate that those factors dented the economy’s overall performance in the first quarter, cutting the GDP growth rate to 0.4% from 0.6% in the final three months of 2015, according to the consensus forecast in a Reuters poll.

Economists at HSBC are more downbeat than the consensus and they forecast the growth rate halved in the first quarter to 0.3%.

“All the signs are that growth slowed in the first quarter,” they wrote in a research note.

They cite last week’s news of a sharp fall in retail sales in March, downbeat surveys from the wider services sector and a drag on the economy from manufacturing and the oil and gas sectors.

Philip Shaw, an economist at Investec, said he is expecting a “mixed picture” from the UK economy.

“On the positive side, our ‘nowcasts’ suggest that construction expanded by 0.6% on the quarter and services by 0.7%. However, at the same time our estimates are for a 1.0% fall in industrial production, including a 0.5% contraction in manufacturing. Overall this would give us a 0.4% increase in GDP with, if anything, the risks tilted towards a slightly faster pace of growth,” said Shaw.

The Bank of England has warned that growth could slow further in the second quarter as uncertainty about the EU referendum outcome prompts companies to delay investment decisions.

But some economists caution that the pressures on the UK economy go beyond Brexit worries and that there are also longer-standing problems such as low productivity growth as well as headwinds from the global economy.

In the US, the world’s largest economy, growth is expected to have slowed in the first quarter. Economists expect the annual growth rate of GDP, released on Thursday, to drop to 0.7% from 1.4% in the final quarter of 2015.

The US Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time in almost a decade late last year but against the backdrop of global turmoil it has become more cautious about raising borrowing costs further. No move is expected at the central bank’s Wednesday meeting but the statement from policymakers “will be scrutinised for signs that a June rate hike remains on the table,” said Chris Scicluna at Daiwa Capital Markets.

The eurozone caps off the trio of big economy GDP readings on Friday, and economists expect slightly brighter news from the single currency bloc. Quarterly growth is forecast to have edged up to 0.4% from 0.3% in the fourth quarter.