“We must get Britain working again,” the UK’s new chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng said last week. He is right. It would help the country’s inflation problem and its growth problem if more people joined the labour market. Yet inactivity — the term economists give to people who are neither working nor looking for work — is on the rise. It’s worth dwelling for a moment on how new this is for Britain’s labour market. In the decade after the financial crisis of 2009, the UK became a more industrious place. The proportion of 16 to 64-year-olds who were inactive fell from about 23 per cent in 2009 to 20 per cent by 2019, the lowest since records began in 1971. Older people retired later and more women joined the workforce. The employment rate for mothers in couples rose over 5 percentage points between 2008 and 2019. It also became more common for single parents to work when their children were young, partly because of changes to welfare rules.
英国新任财政大臣夸西•克沃滕(Kwasi Kwarteng)上周表示：“我们必须让英国人重新工作起来。”他是对的。如果有更多的人进入劳动力市场，将有助于解决英国的通胀和manbetx20客户端下载 增长问题。然而，不活跃（manbetx20客户端下载 学家用这个词称呼既不工作也不找工作的人）人数正在上升。