A century has passed since the first call for a British national minimum wage (NMW).That remarkable Fabian tract discussed wage setting, coverage, monopsony,international labour standards, inspection and compliance and the interaction betweenthe NMW and the social security system. The NMW was finally introduced in 1999.It has raised the real and relative pay of low wage workers, narrowed the gender paygap and now covers around 1-worker-in-10. The consequences for employment havebeen extensively analysed using information on individuals, areas and firms. There islittle or no evidence of any employment effects. The reasons for this include: animpact on hours rather than workers; employer wage setting and labour marketfrictions; offsets via the tax credit system; incomplete compliance; improvements inproductivity; an increase in the relative price of minimum wage-produced consumerservices; and a reduction in the relative profits of firms employing low paid workers.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Centre for Economic Performance, LSE in its series CEP Discussion Papers with number
dp0781.
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.)