Unemployment number down

jonnygee2

Any system which means you "take home" less for working 30 hours a week than you do for working 16 hours a week

Can you demonstrate the math behind this statement?

. But scratch just a tiny bit past the surface and you find people self employed earning £90 a week and actually taking home £26k a year due to tax credits

Again can you demonstrate how someone earns 26k / year + housing benefits with an income of £90 /wk using tax credits.

kabayiri

Graham is right about the self employed angle into tax credits.

At one point, advisers on the Work Program were promoting the idea of people going self employed, with roles which were not really suitable for a sustainable career.

You can understand why the Work Program providers would do this. All the financial reward was geared on successfully placing people; self employed counted.

GreatApe

StevieJ wrote: »

Are they not dragging UK wages down? I would have though that if they leave wage growth would increase?

That is a misconception and easy to prove wrong.

Imagine a model where jobs are split into 5 brackets. 1 the lowest paid jobs like bin men and tesco workers etc and 5 the highest and so on

Lets say almost all the 1 jobs are done by migrants.
Lets say they all leave.
What happens. Is the national average wage now higher? After all there are only people earning 2-3-4-5 now and no 1s left?

Sure thats how it works until you realize the jobs that are low paid are often required and not optional. So if all the 1s leave what happens in roughly 20% of those in group 2 get demoted roughly 20% of those in group 3 get demoted etc until you have a new economy that looks much like the old economy made up of 1-5s and the average is much the same as before

What this means is we british should want LOW SKILL MIGRATION
If we import ten million low skilled migrants they push the locals up the skill and pay grades
On the other hand if we imported ten million high skilled migrants that would be horrific for the locals because the locals would be pushed DOWN the skill and pay grades.

GreatApe

Thrugelmir wrote: »

How many people would like to work more hours?

I've thought for a long time there should be some sort of government push to try and get lower paid workers to apply for higher paid work as I have meet lots of min wage workers who say they would like more pay more status more responsibility but do not look for or apply for anything else they just cost.

This is a huge national problem.
Instead of people aiming higher and becoming more productive people get a job any job and just cut their expenditure to meet their income rather than trying to increase their income to meet higher level needs and wants

GreatApe

This is another misconception the idea that the brits are unproductive is wrong

This is easy to prove you just look at next door France and look at GDP per capital. When the pound is above 1.13 euro the UK is more productive when it is lower France is more productive and for most the last 10 years the pound was above 1.13 euro meaning the UK for most the last 10 years was more productive

This is despite the UK paying more net EU subs and giving more foreign aid and spending more on defense than France and France has other natural advantages like a LOT more land giving it more agriculture and imputed GDP too.

Thrugelmir

GreatApe wrote: »

This is easy to prove you just look at next door France and look at GDP per capital. When the pound is above 1.13 euro the UK is more productive when it is lower France is more productive and for most the last 10 years the pound was above 1.13 euro meaning the UK for most the last 10 years was more productive

Productivity is based on hours worked not exchange rates.

GreatApe

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Productivity is based on hours worked not exchange rates.

Not quite but I am aware of what you are trying to say. it goes to show how pointless the metric is and how much confusion it causes

You have a situation where the productivity figures show UK workers are 20% (or whatever) less productive than the French but conversely where the UK economy is bigger (more output) even with a smaller workforce

The conclusion drawn by most is that if only we fixed our productivity problems we would be so much richer or better off. But that simply is false because the french are more productive but are in fact poorer (on average over the last decade)

The take away imo seems to be that in a service sector dominated economy one way to improve productivity is work 20% less and be 5% poorer a la France but at least it looks like your workers are productive.

antrobus

GreatApe wrote: »

...

You have a situation where the productivity figures show UK workers are 20% (or whatever) less productive than the French but conversely where the UK economy is bigger (more output) even with a smaller workforce...

That's arithmetically impossible.:)

And also horribly wrong, because the UK has a larger workforce than France. The UK and France have roughly the same number of adults of working age, but the UK employment rate is 75% compared to 65% in France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_employment_rate

I think that means an extra 4 million or so workers.

Google is very good for fact checking.:)

P.S. I know wikipedia is not a source, But in this case they are only reformatting OECD stats,

GreatApe

antrobus wrote: »

That's arithmetically impossible.:)

And also horribly wrong, because the UK has a larger workforce than France. The UK and France have roughly the same number of adults of working age, but the UK employment rate is 75% compared to 65% in France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_employment_rate

I think that means an extra 4 million or so workers.

Google is very good for fact checking.:)

P.S. I know wikipedia is not a source, But in this case they are only reformatting OECD stats,

Thanks

Amazingly it seems the UK has 5.3 million more employed than France does despite having a slightly larger population. Somewhat less dramatic when you split to full and part time and look at the ages of those working or not

UK 32.3 million: 24.7 million full time and 7.6 million part time
France 27.0 million: 23.1 million full time and 3.9 million part time

The biggest difference seems to be the 15-24 age group. with less than 30% of that group working in France vs more than 50% in the UK.

If you model it as a part time worker equivalent to 0.4 full time workers it would be full time equivalent of 27.75 vs 24.66 or roughly speaking UK works about 13% more than the French.

Comparing the economies needs to look at the exchange rate and over the last 20 years average exchange has been 1 pound = 1.33 euro

France GDP is 2.29 Trillion Euro
UK GDP is £2.07 trillion pounds convert

That means whenever the pound buy more than 1.106 Euro the UK economy is bigger (producers 'more')

Taking into account that we have about 12.5% more full time equivalent workers means the UK is more productive when the pound buys more than 1.255 euro and the average exchange rate over the last 20 years has been 1 pound = 1.33 euro


So in conclusion it seems the UK economy is currently bigger but only just using todays exchange rates. Looking at the average over the last 20 years the UK economy was much bigger and productivity was also higher in the UK. Overall I would say the take away is that the French and the UK are probably just about as productive as each other but that the UK currency is weak at the moment. It should be closer to 1.25 euro per pound at which point UK and French productivity would be the same (but the UK economy overall bigger as we have more people working)

antrobus

IMF figures show that the UK economy is a bit bigger than France.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/the-worlds-biggest-economies-in-2018/

They are both about USD 2.9 trillion. Output per worker is about 12% higher in France, but the UK worforce is 15% bigger. So they cancel each other out.