Sectoral Mobility in UK and US Labour Markets

David Greenaway, Richard Upward and Peter Wright

Chapter 5 in Creating an Internationally Competitive Economy, 2001, pp 72-104 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The pattern of employment in the United Kingdom has changed rapidly over the past two decades, with perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of this being the shift in the balance between manufacturing and service industries. Between 1975 and 1995 employment in manufacturing fell from 9.6 million to 5.6 million, whilst service employment increased from 12.5 million to over 15 million. Many of these new service sector workers were women, whose activity rates over this period increased from 47.4 to 53.3 per cent. This transition has not been achieved without cost however. Over the 1980s unemployment in the United Kingdom rose rapidly, reaching 3.1 million in 1983 and remaining at over 2 million for much of the 1980s. The period also saw a rapid deterioration in the relative position of unskilled labour, with the less well-educated being more than three times as likely to suffer unemployment (Nickell and Bell, 1996). For those who remained in employment their relative position also worsened, with the wages of blue-collar workers falling rapidly compared with those of white-collar workers (Hine and Wright, 1998).

Keywords: Current Population Survey; Labour Force Survey; Housing Tenure; Employment Share; Baseline Probability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-55706-2_5

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DOI: 10.1057/9780230557062_5

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