“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.
英國新任財政大臣夸西?克沃滕(Kwasi Kwarteng)上周表示：“我們必須讓英國人重新工作起來?！彼菍Φ?。如果有更多的人進入勞動力市場，將有助于解決英國的通脹和經(jīng)濟增長問題。然而，不活躍（經(jīng)濟學(xué)家用這個詞稱呼既不工作也不找工作的人）人數(shù)正在上升。