The minimum wage has never been as high on the political agenda as it is today, with politicians in Germany, the UK, the US, and other OECD countries calling for substantial increases in the rate. One reason for the rising interest is the growing consensus among economists and policymakers that...

Leading experts examine, for the first time, the impact of New Labour policies on the labour market over the past 5 years. Looking behind the 'good news' implied by the lowest headline unemployment rates since the 1970s and by a low and stable rate of inflation, it will examine the impact of...

The previous Labour government pledged to abolish child poverty and introduced a range of welfare reforms that emphasised the role of work as the primary route out of poverty. This culminated in the Child Poverty Act (2010) which commits all future governments to the abolition of child poverty....

In the 1980s and 1990s successive United Kingdom governments enacted a series of reforms to establish a more market-oriented economy, closer to the American model and further away from its Western European competitors. Today, the United Kingdom is one of the least regulated economies in the...

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by the empirical findings in some labour markets. In this paper we present a theoretical framework which is general enough to...

Scholars emphasize that poverty in Britain has risen sharply since the late 1970s. Meanwhile in the United States, both official figures and traditional poverty scholars report sharp declines in poverty. We seek to provide a comparison of poverty levels in Britain and the US based on a set of...

This paper focuses on the estimation and testing of equivalence scales in the context of a demand system with nonline ar logarithmic expenditure effects in its budget-share equations. The authors show that such nonlinearity enables one to identify the scal es without demographic separability...

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by empirical work in some labor markets. The authors present a general theoretical model whereby employers have some degree of...