Debate about the effect of minimum wages on employment in the United Kingdom has not paid much attention to the impact of the existing system of minimum wages, the Wages Council. In this paper, we look at the consequences of the declining importance of the Wages Council in the 1980s for wage inequality and employment in the covered industries. We find that there has been a significant increase in wage inequality as a result of the failure to raise minimum wages in line with earnings, but there is no evidence that the declining minimum produced any beneficial employment effects. If anything, there seems to be a positive correlation between minimum wages and employment, an effect that seems particularly strong in the catering sector.
Download Info
To our knowledge, this item is not available for
download. To find whether it is available, there are three
options:
1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online.
2. Check on the provider's web page
whether it is in fact available.
3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be
available.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Centre for Economic Performance, LSE in its series CEP Discussion Papers with number
dp0080.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Related research
Keywords:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.