Analysis and action on living standards
New report: the UK is facing its highest risk of recession since 2007, and those on lower incomes are particularly exposed. Macroeconomic policy plays a crucial role in supporting the economy in the aftermath of a recession, but is our current framework recession ready?
A tight labour market is finally delivering decent pay growth. We can safely say now that we more or less back to ‘normal’ on pay growth. And with employment (and unemployment) little changed in recent months – at record highs and close to record lows respectively – it looks like the labour market has settled into a healthy holding pattern. But we should not take this for granted – it has taken ten years to get the economy delivering on both jobs and pay. And there remains an underlying fragility.
The Resolution Foundation is an independent think-tank focused on improving the living standards for those on low to middle incomes. We work across a wide range of economic and social policy, combining our core purpose with a commitment to analytical rigour.
The good news is we’ve now managed a recession free decade since the financial crisis. The bad news is that history teaches us this is quite unusual – booms and bust haven’t been abolished.
We are looking for an exceptional candidate to lead our work on the UK social security system and help drive the production of high quality, innovative economic analysis and associated social policy recommendations.
The Resolution Foundation calculates the real Living Wage – a voluntary hourly pay rate that is based on what families need to get by. The current national rate is:
In our latest quarterly Earnings Outlook, we focus on two of the biggest changes to the UK labour market over the past two decades – rising self-employment (from 3.4 million in 1999 to 5 million today) and the introduction and ramping up of the legal minimum wage (from £3.60 in 1999 to £8.21 today) – to assess whether the two trends are linked.
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