PSE analysis of unpublished data shows that the majority of the UK population has suffered from a fall in their living standards during the current government’s term of office. The data, which the DWP had declined to publish before the election, was released to the EU statistical office.
Income inequality and social divisions could worsen and become entrenched unless governments in developed countries act quickly to boost support for the most vulnerable people in society, according to a new report from the Organisation of Economic and Social Development (OECD).
The report also warns that poverty will become ever more entrenched in the UK if the government does not maintain social spending.
The five richest families in the UK are now wealthier than the bottom 20 per cent of the entire population, according to a briefing drawn up by Oxfam. That means just five households have more money than 12.6 million people put together – almost the same as the number of people living below the poverty line.
The social and economic impact of inequality costs the UK the equivalent of over £39 billion every year, according to new calculations from the Equality Trust.
If inequality were reduced to the average level seen in other developed countries, the Trust says, the UK could expect to make significant savings through reduced ill-health and other social problems.
The pay gap between the over-50s and under-21s has ballooned by 50 per cent in the past decade and a half, at the same time as people in their 20s have seen rents rise by more than a third, according to a new report from the Intergenerational Foundation.
The richest ten per cent of the UK working-age population now have nearly twice the original income between them of the entire bottom half of the distribution, according to a report from the Resolution Foundation think tank.
The Foundation's annual audit of trends in living standards also reveals that, despite the beginnings of a slow improvement, the living standards of the typical household will still be 3.5 per cent lower in 2018-19 than they were at the start of the financial crisis of 2008, only just inching above the level they were last at in 2005-06.
Governments are capable of reducing income inequality despite countervailing behavioural responses, according to a research paper from the Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim.
The paper uses a panel of industrialised OECD countries over the period 1981-2005 to analyse the effect of redistributive policies on post-tax inequality.
Scotland’s top one per cent of income earners – about 25,000 people – have increased their wages and total income at a greater rate than the rest of the nation’s workers in the past decade, according to a new report by a team at Stirling University.
Worsening income inequality in Germany in recent decades is the result of a combination of factors that includes less effective state redistribution mechanisms, according to a paper from academics in Düsseldorf.
The paper examines the main drivers of the rise in income inequality observed over the period 1991–2010.