Zero hours contracts and youth employment
From the
employer's point of view, a zero hours contract is a great example of the
benefits of the flexible labour market. They allow the employer to change the
number of hours an employee works each week, with more shifts offered when they
are busy, and fewer when they are not; costs can therefore be controlled and
matched more exactly to revenue. Neil Carberry at the CBI says that they have
helped to save jobs during the recession and stagnant growth: "It's zero
hours contracts and other forms of flexible working that mean there are half a
million fewer unemployed people than there might otherwise have been." Now
figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS)
show the number of 16 to 24-year-olds on zero hours contracts has more than
doubled since the start of the economic downturn, rising from 35,000 in 2008 to
76,000 in 2012. This means that one in every three people on a zero-hours
contract is under 25 (- although that proportion doesn't look as if it has
changed very dramatically throughout the period shown). If this is good for the employer, how is it for the
employee?
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Unit 2 Macro: Does High Home Ownership Cause Unemployment?
For many years Professor Andrew Oswald has researched the links between home ownership levels and labour market performance. This new paper with Professor David Blanchflower takes the debate forward - they argue that rising home ownership can bring about negative externalities for the rest of the economy, damaging labour mobility and curtailing new business start-ups. It is an argument worth looking at when we discover some of the structural causes of joblessness. Read the article here
See also: It's not the deficit that will haunt our children: it's unemployment (Heather Stewart, The Observer, May 2013)
See also: Forget inflation – what hurts the most is unemployment (David Blanchflower, Independent, April 2013)
Analysis of Youth Unemployment
This two-minute video from The Economist analyses the growing problem of youth unemployment in selected developed economies since the start of the financial crisis in 2007, including Greece, Spain, the UK, France, US and Germany. The chilling statistic from The Economist is that almost a quarter of the world's young people eligible for employment are without a job.
read more...»UK Economy Revision - Policies to Reduce Unemployment
Here is a streamed (and downloadable) presentation on policies to cut unemployment in the UK economy.
read more...»The Angry Economist 2 - The George Osborne Edition (evaluating macroeconomic policies)
He's back but he's still angry! In this latest version of The Angry Economist, our favourite curmudgeonly analyst wants to know students' opinion on George Osborne's economic policies - no wonder his blood pressure has risen!
This simple Powerpoint resource is aimed at getting your students to analyse and evaluate economic policies - 8 of the Chancellor's policies are presented and the Angry Economist randomly picks a macro-economic objective to consider. All you have to do is get 8 volunteers from your class to do the analysing - a great 10 minute activity whilst revising for the up-coming macro exams at either GCSE, AS or A2 level.
Here is a list of the policies the Angry Economist wants students to look at (you may wish to recap on them before you start the activity):
- Reduce Government debt
- Increased number of private sector jobs
- Increased allowance before Income Tax needs to be paid
- Cut Corporation Tax
- Set up Regional Growth Fund
- Funding Lending Scheme
- Deregulating some planning rules
- Frozen Council Tax
Of course, the beauty of this resource is that you can change any of these policies to whatever you want them to be.
Click on this link to download the Angry Economist 2.
PS. Click on this link to have a look at the original Angry Economist.
Paul Ormerod: Whatever happened to all those miners? Shocks and economic resilience
Where have all the miners gone? To judge by the rhetoric of the BBC and other Leftist media outlets, whole swathes of Britain lie devastated, plagued by rickets, unemployment and endemic poverty – nearly thirty years after the pit closures under Lady Thatcher!
The reality is different. There is indeed a small number of local authority areas where employment has never really recovered from the closures in the 1980s. But, equally, there are former mining areas which have prospered.
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Unit 2 and Unit 4 Macro: Economic Simulation - the Government Game
Introducing The Government Game - tutor2u's new Economic Simulation game that is just perfect for revising for AS & A2 Macroeconomic Policy topics!
Unit 4 Macro: Language Proficiency and Labour Mobility in Europe
Increasing foreign language proficiency could be a key policy tool for encouraging greater mobility of labour between countries of the European Union and reducing the huge differences in rates of youth unemployment. According to research by Professors Ainhoa Aparicio-Fenoll and Zoe
Kuehn, including foreign language studies in the compulsory school curriculum fosters migration across European countries.
Unit 2 Macro: Wealth of Nations and Human Capital
A recent World Bank report asked ‘Where is the Wealth of Nations?’ Calculations presented at the Economic History Society’s 2013 annual conference show that for Britain, the answer is undoubtedly in its people.
Dr Jan Kunnas and his colleagues calculate that Britain’s ‘human capital’ has grown by a multiple of 123 over the past 250 years. The main drivers of this phenomenal growth have been the growth in the workforce and the growth in wages.
The researchers define human capital as the knowledge and skills embodied in individuals – and they measure it by the discounted earnings the population is expected to earn during their time in the labour force.
We have an extended revision note on human capital and economic growth - read it hereThe Changing Wealth of Nations - World Bank reports can be accessed here
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Unit 4 Macro: Getting Back to Growth - Lessons from the 1930s
How Britain escaped from the travails of the Great Depression and achieved 4% a year growth in the years from 1933 to 1937 has important lessons for today’s policy-makers, according to research by Professor Nicholas Crafts, presented at the Economic History Society’s 2013 annual conference.
read more...»Unit 2 Macro: The Great Productivity Puzzle
GDP per hour – labour productivity – in the UK remains lower than at the beginning of the recession in 2008. A special session at the Royal Economic Society on Friday 5 April held jointly by the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) and Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) investigated the causes of this mystery. It was also the subject of radio 4 In Business - click here
See also: the Job Rich Depression (The Economist)
Unit 3 Micro: Minimum Wage and Inequality
The UK national minimum wage (NMW) has been in the news in recent days with several reports suggesting that Coalition government ministers are considering introducing a freeze on the pay floor or going further and reducing the minimum hourly pay rate. The NMW was introduced into the UK in the spring of 1999 and has been up-rated regularly but never cut. It is presently at £6.19 an hour and recommendations on changes to the pay floor come from the annual review conducted by the Low Pay Commission
Unit 4 Macro: Unemployment in Germany - The Hartz Reforms
Germany’s low unemployment is in large part due to the ‘Hartz Reforms’, which started as early as 2003 and have reduced the long-run rate of unemployment by 1.1%. That is the central finding of research by Matthias Hertweck and Oliver Sigrist, to be presented at the Royal Economic Society’s 2013 annual conference.
Unemployment rates across much of Europe have surged to unprecedented levels in recent years, particularly among the southern countries. In contrast, German unemployment has continued to fall even during the Great Recession. The authors conclude:
‘Our results build a solid basis for the macroeconomic effectiveness of such labour market reforms. This is particularly important for policy-makers across Europe who are currently planning to undertake similar structural reforms.’
Unit 4 Macro: Unemployment in Europe (March 2013 Update)
The scale and depth of the unemployment crisis in Europe is confirmed by fresh figures released by Euro Stat. Unemployment in the Euro Zone was 12.0% in February 2013 and the jobless rate for the European Union as a whole was 10.9%. Last month there were 26.3 million people counted as out of work in the twenty-seven countries within the single market, 19 million of whom live in Euro Zone countries. In the last year alone, unemployment in the Euro Zone has jumped by over 1.7 million but this aggregate figure hides large country differences and persistent regional and local variations. Here is the contextual data to take into the exam:
Unit 2 Macro: Fresh Serving of Acronym Soup - ZIRPs and PLOGs
Economic commentators love their acronyms and abbreviations - they come in handy when reaching character capacity limits on a tweet and also for students fighting the exam clock to complete a timed essay. Two new ones have come to my attention in recent days. What does ZIRP and PLOG mean to you?
read more...»Revision Quiz: AS Economics: Unemployment (1)
This 10-question revision quiz focuses on unemployment.
Launch Revision Quiz: AS Economics: Unemployment (1)
Is this the start of Plan B?
It’s not often you read such a clearly set out, even-handed article on macroeconomic policy, so this relatively lengthy piece was interesting in itself as its writer appears to deal relatively equally with both sides of the big austerity debate. But you really have to take notice when the writer is the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Vince Cable.
Unit 4 Macro: A Manifesto for Growth - the LSE Growth Commission Report
On Thursday 31st of January 2013, the long-awaited LSE Growth Commission Report was published and launched in London. The document itself is available for download from this link and I urge all teachers and students interested in growth, competitiveness and the fairness agenda to have a look at it. It is full of rewarding and important insights into the drivers of balanced growth in a modern advanced economy.
I will be adding new resources and links to this blog following the launch event
Key Points from LSE Growth Report
Existing Strengths
- Strong rule of law
- Generally competitive product markets
- Flexible labour market
- A world-class university system
- Openness to foreign investors and migrants
- Independent regulators including competition authorities
- Strengths in many key sectors including high end manufacturing
LSE Commission Growth Agenda
Education
- Greater autonomy for schools, tackle the long tail of under-performance. Conditional cash transfers for families to pupil attendance and performance. Focus league tables less on % attaining 5 A-C grades. Reveal performance at the bottom end.
- Concentrating on skills (improving human capital) gives people the resilience to recover from global shifts in the division of labour
Infrastructure
- Critical infrastructure essential for competitiveness in modern economy. For the UK, transport and energy are infrastructure areas with biggest issues; there has been a lack of clear strategy and lots of dithering / political delays.
- Huge opportunities for UK - industrial revolution driven by search for low-carbon technologies driving innovation - can the UK keep up?
LSE Commission proposes:
- 1) Strategy Board (for planning)
- 2) Planning Commission (for delivery)
- 3) Infrastructure Bank (for funding)
Innovation
- Innovation is the third channel for increased growth
- Problems in UK capital markets mean innovation is not properly funded - short-termism remains a structural weakness of the markets
Banking/ Finance
- More competition in retail banking
- Business bank that prioritises lending to SMEs and innovative firms
Changing the compass of economic performance
- Commission suggests that focus on GDP is not helpful
- GDP misses out on who gets the growth and measures production not income
- Need more focus on Median Household Income
- Median household income and GDP per capita have been decoupled since about 2002. GDP no longer tracks it
Overall
UK trend growth rate can be lifted by 0.5% with effective structural reforms - large compound effect on incomes over the long run
Institutions and incentives matter for growth. Macro stability important too. UK politics too short term and adversarial. Fundamental weakness is the failure to create a stable policy framework.
More focus needed on evidence based policy making to make government smarter.
Here Professor John Van Reenen, Director of CEP and co-chair of the LSE Growth Commission, presents a 'manifesto for growth' for the UK economy over the next 50 years, backed up by the Growth Commission's report.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: The Failure of Austerity
Here is a selection of links and news videos on the vexed economic, social and political issue of fiscal austerity - there is a particular focus on the effects of austerity in the debt-ridden crisis countries of the Euro Zone
read more...»Unit 2 Macro: Key Term Glossary
An updated glossary of key terms for AS macro
read more...»Prospects for the UK Economy in 2013
As the sun rises on another year will the headwinds be favourable for Britain or are we facing up to another year of stresses and strains? Here is a brief commentary and overview of some of the key macroeconomic data for the UK economy together with some links to external articles and videos on economic prospects for Britain as we head in 2013.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Student visa restrictions may curb growth and innovation
Any visa policies that restrict entry by highly productive foreign students are a significant barrier to science and ultimately to innovation and growth. That is one of the conclusions of research by Professors Eric Stuen, Mushfiq Mobarak and Keith Maskus, published in the latest issue of the Economic Journal.
Their study of 700,000 postgraduates in the science and engineering laboratories of the top US universities finds that American students and foreign students are both highly significant contributors to the development of scientific knowledge. But greater diversity in the origins of foreign students raises their joint contribution to knowledge.
These findings imply that visa restrictions limiting the entry of high- ability foreign students – as well as visa policies that prioritise students’ ability to pay tuition fees over their technical merits – would significantly undermine scientific output.
Unit 2 Macro: Unemployment in a Recession
Here is a film of the Royal Economic Society's annual
public lecture 2012 by Nobel laureate Professor Chris Pissarides
Workplace Discrimination
| Employment Rate | Employment Rate | Unemployment Rate | Unemployment Rate | Inactivity Rate | Inactivity Rate | |
| MEN | WOMEN | MEN | WOMEN | MEN | WOMEN | |
| White | 76.6% | 67.6% | 8.3% | 6.8% | 16.4% | 27.5% |
| Mixed or Multiple | 64.3% | 55.3% | 15.7% | 15.8% | 23.7% | 34.3% |
| Black | 61.4% | 55.6% | 21.7% | 17.7% | 21.6% | 32.4% |
| Indian | 77.0% | 60.6% | 8.2% | 11.1% | 16.2% | 31.9% |
| Pakistani/Bangladeshi | 68.7% | 28.9% | 12.8% | 20.5% | 21.3% | 63.6% |
| Chinese & Other | 67.0% | 51.8% | 10.3% | 10.6% | 25.3% | 42.1% |
| Ethnic Minority | 68.2% | 50.8% | 13.2% | 14.3% | 21.5% | 40.8% |
| All | 75.6% | 65.6% | 8.9% | 7.5% | 17.0% | 29.1% |
If you have seen the news stories today showing how workplace discrimination towards ethnic minority women continues to cause the government concern, you may be interested to read the full report. It is available from the Runnymede Trust (it requires registration but it is free) and has been written for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Race and Community. There's a brief summary from the BBC, but the full report gives recommendations that you might like to present to students as possible government intervention strategies and get them to evaluate accordingly. The table above gives you a flavour of the statistics that can be used to discuss inequality of income and wealth.
Unit 2 Macro: Underemployment in the UK Economy
The Office of National Statistics published some important data this week on the state of the UK labour market as the economy struggles to sustain a decent recovery. They released information showing that the number of underemployed workers i.e. those who want to work more hours, has risen by an estimated 1 million (or 47.3%) since the start of the economic downturn in 2008 to stand at 3.05 million in 2012. Nearly two thirds of the 1 million increase took place in the 12 months between 2008 and 2009, when the economy was in recession.
From 2000 to just before the 2008/09 recession the number of people underemployed was relatively steady and since 2009 the number has been rising, although at a much slower rate than during the recession.
We thank Hannah Thomas from the ONS who has provided us with this superb info-graphic on under-employment
Underemployed_Workers_Graphic.pdf
This will make for a terrific teaching resource in the classroom and help to deepen student understanding of differences between unemployment and under-employment.
Nobel Winner address youth unemployment
Youth unemployment is higher than adult unemployment even in normal economic times. But in recessions, especially in countries with rigid labour markets, young people typically stay unemployed for too long. In these circumstances, urgent policy action is needed to avoid long-term unemployment, which destroys talent and creates social problems.
Unit 2 Macro: Unemployment Rises as Hovis Factory Closes
Premier Foods is the UK's largest food manufacturer but in November 2012 they have announced the closure of two large bakeries that have - for many years - produced Hovis bread for supermarkets. The closure of the factories follows the loss of its £75m-a-year contract with Co-operative supermarkets. Hundreds of jobs are set to be lost in the spring of 2013 with damaging consequences for the local economy. What types of unemployment can you associate with these factory closures? What measures might be appropriate in addressing the extra unemployment problem that will result?
BBC news: Hovis shuts bakeries - click here
Hovis bakery worker devastated - click here
Unit 2 Macro: Revision Resources on Inflation and Unemployment
Here are collections of regularly updated resources on two key AS macro topics, inflation and unemployment
The Big Issue of Poverty in the UK
This article in the BBC about the 21st anniversary of the launch of the Big Issue newspaper acts as a timely reminder that we can find our very own examples of absolute as well as relative poverty in the UK.
read more...»Unit 2 Macro: Record(ing) Unemployment
As unemployment hits the headlines for the wrong reasons again : ‘The Eurozone is heading for disaster’.... ‘the lost generation’.... it is a great opportunity to study the theoretical concepts in this area. Unemployment in the eurozone hit a fresh high of 18.2 million in August; the highest unemployment rate was recorded in Spain, where 25.1% of the workforce is out of a job! Youth unemployment remains a particular concern, with the rate among under-25s hitting 22.8% across the eurozone and data from Eurostat shows that 55.4% of adults under 25 are out of work in Greece, compared to 52.9% in Spain!
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