IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/ceprwu/006.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Return of Falling Real Wages

Author

Listed:
  • David Blanchflower
  • Rui Costa
  • Stephen Machin

Abstract

The falling real wages experienced by most UK workers between 2008 and 2014 were followed by modest growth in 2015 and 2016. But it has now reversed back as real wages have once again started to fall. This is courtesy of the post-Brexit rise in price inflation that has occurred, coupled with the persistent 2 percent nominal wage growth norm that seems to have become firmly established in the UK labour market. In this real wage update, we first consider the most recent wage growth numbers and appraise the Bank of England forecasts. Next we consider what has been happening to real wages for different groups of workers. Then, in the light of the recent employment patterns, we discuss another key feature of the UK labour market, the rise in low wage selfemployment. We end with some conclusions.

Suggested Citation

  • David Blanchflower & Rui Costa & Stephen Machin, 2017. "The Return of Falling Real Wages," CEP Real Wages Updates 006, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:ceprwu:006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/rwu006.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jack Blundell & Stephen Machin, 2020. "Self-employment in the Covid-19 crisis," CEP Covid-19 Analyses cepcovid-19-003, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    2. Lawson, Julie & Pawson, Hal & Troy, Laurence & van den Nouwelant, Ryan & Hamilton, Carrie & Hayward, Richard Donald, 2018. "Social housing as infrastructure: an investment pathway," SocArXiv e9hky, Center for Open Science.
    3. Machin, Stephen & Costa, Rui & Dhingra, Swati, 2019. "Trade and Worker Deskilling," CEPR Discussion Papers 13768, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. Blundell, Jack & Machin, Stephen, 2020. "Self-employment in the Covid-19 crisis: a CEP Covid-19 analysis," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 104550, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    5. Ryan Lorraine & MacMahon Juliet & O’Sullivan Michelle & Turner Thomas & Lavelle Jonathan & Murphy Caroline & O’Brien Mike & Gunnigle Patrick, 2019. "The Same but Different: Regulating Zero Hours Work in Two Liberal Market Economies," The Irish Journal of Management, Sciendo, vol. 38(1), pages 3-15, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    real wages; wages; growth;
    All these keywords.

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:ceprwu:006. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/real-wage-updates/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.