UK Recovery Threatened by Low Wages

Britain’s economy has been on the up over the last few months, with an improving employment picture and rosier growth prospects.

But the average Briton has yet to feel this in their wallets: Weekly real wages are growing far below the 2 percent inflation level at 0.9 percent. And it doesn’t look like this could improve. The U.K.’s economic uptick is down to increased spending and not productivity. This could threaten the long-term prospects for the country’s recovery, according to a report by a leading think tank.

“It is because the recovery so far has been driven by consumer spending rather than increased productivity, so people have spent more and have had to reduce their savings to do so, but they are not earning more,” Jonathan Portes, director of NIESR, told CNBC in a phone interview.

While NIESR raised their forecast for the U.K. economy, predicting it to grow 2.5 per cent in 2014 and 2.1 per cent in 2015, productivity stagnation “poses a downside risk to the UK’s medium-term prospects”.

via CNBC

Content is for general information purposes only. It is not investment advice or a solution to buy or sell securities. Opinions are the authors; not necessarily that of OANDA Business Information & Services, Inc. or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, officers or directors. If you would like to reproduce or redistribute any of the content found on MarketPulse, an award winning forex, commodities and global indices analysis and news site service produced by OANDA Business Information & Services, Inc., please access the RSS feed or contact us at info@marketpulse.com. Visit https://www.marketpulse.com/ to find out more about the beat of the global markets. © 2023 OANDA Business Information & Services Inc.

Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency
trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza