Can improving UK skills levels reduce poverty and income inequality by 2020?

a research paper by Mark Taylor (Director of Research at ISER), Tina Haux (Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast) and Steve Pudney (Director of the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-social Change) published by JRF (Jospeh Rowntree Foundation).

Abstract

Improving skills among the workforce is seen as fundamental to achieving a more competitive economy and maintaining productivity, with a world-class skills base considered a key driver of competitive advantage (BIS, 2010). This report uses data from the British Household Panel Survey to investigate how projected improvements in skills levels in the UK economy between now and 2020 will affect rates of poverty and income inequality.

The report:

• models the impact of skills on the probability of employment and on earnings derived from employment for working-age people;
• uses estimates from these models to predict the distribution of earnings, and simulate the distribution of net household incomes, likely to arise from the distribution of skills by 2020; and
• predicts the levels of poverty and income inequality likely to be engendered by the different distribution of skills.

Full text (PDF 60pp)

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