Monday, February 19, 2018

The youth austerity policy

UK millennials have suffered the second-worst falls in their earnings of any of the dozen advanced economies surveyed by a think tank over the past decade.
In a new report, the Resolution Foundation calculates that average real hourly earnings for under-30s in Britain fell 13 per cent between 2007 and 2014.
 Only Greece, where real earnings slumped by 25 per cent over the same period as the eurozone country plunged into depression, saw a worst performance for this age group among the dozen advanced economies Resolution analysed in the latest research from its Intergenerational Commission. British millennials experienced bigger earnings falls than other crisis-hit southern eurozone states such as Portugal and Italy, where they fell 12 per cent and 6 per cent respectively. Average earnings for Spanish millennials fell by only around 2 per cent.
“The pay squeeze has been deeper in the UK than in most other places, and more focused on young people in particular,” said Resolution.
Another major finding from the study is that millennials in the UK, relative to younger people in other high-income countries, have experienced a pronounced “bust” in rising living standards, following a long “boom” of generation-on-generation advancement in previous decades.
“Only Spain echoes the UK experience of a ‘boom and bust’ income cycle where significant generation-on-generation gains for older generations have come to a stop for younger people,” said Daniel Tomlinson, a policy analyst at Resolution.

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