UK shift into less productive work
Very revealing article. We were talking to our friends in Upper Teesdale about just this phenomenon today. This article tells us:
Since the 2008 financial crisis, productivity has barely grown at all.
But new research now provides part of the answer to this puzzle.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that it is not so much that we don’t have productive industries, it is just that more of us are working in the unproductive ones.
Productivity is the main driver of long term economic growth and higher living standards.
The study of changes in productivity before and after the credit crunch, shows that before it struck people were moving into more productive industries and productivity was growing at 2% a year on average.
But since then there has been a shift away from working in highly productive areas like mining to less productive ones like food and drinks services.
It seems too many cooks really can spoil the broth.
There was lower productivity growth in some industries as well, such as telecommunications and finance. The property sector saw a rapid growth in productivity.
However, the largest factor seems to be that far more people have found work in parts of the economy that are just not that productive.
There has also been a sharp decline in labour mobility, normally you would expect people to move from lower paid and unproductive industries to higher paid and more productive ones.
One reason for that might be that high house prices make it more difficult and less attractive to move around the country for new, better jobs.