Minimum wages: the economics and the politics

Alan Manning

CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: The UK's national minimum wage has tackled extreme low pay - but the wider problem of low pay remains as serious as ever. That is one of the conclusions of Professor Alan Manning in a discussion of the growing popularity of minimum wages as a way of tackling inequality - and the likelihood that it will lead to minimum wages that are much higher than we have seen before in some parts of the world. He notes that the driving force behind higher minimum wages is that they are very popular with voters - but even most economists now agree that they have little or no negative effect on employment. Big increases in minimum wages will test the view that negative effects on employment must eventually kick in.

Keywords: National Minimum Wage; employment; living wage; politics; public policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J38 J41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv and nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp419.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepcnp:419

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().