Philip Pearson
In a signal of intent, the UN has suspended Romania’s right to trade its “surplus” carbon emissions after it breached rules on carbon emissions reporting. This ruling matters to the UN. It has to demonstrate that the Kyoto Protocol works and is trustworthy. Renewing the 27-nation Kyoto Protocol may be the only “hard” outcome from the climate negotiations in Durban this December. An all-nation binding agreement to cut emissions looks to be a vanishing prospect.
Richard Exell
Jared Bernstein has marked the 15th anniversary of America’s welfare reform legislation with a couple of really interesting posts on his blog. Calls for workfare or time-limited benefit entitlement are often justified by reference to the success of the US reforms, so this is more than an academic exercise for British progressives. In his first post, he points out that the key point about welfare reform is that it performed best when the economy was doing best – under Bill Clinton, when the jobs were being created that justified the focus on welfare-to-work. In the early years, the introduction of welfare-to-work obligations went hand-in-hand with investment in activation programmes and increases in the minimum wage -
if you’re expecting to increase supply in the low-wage labor market, you need to have a decent wage floor in place
More importantly, as the jobs market got worse and unemployment rose, the new system has not picked up the slack. The number of poor children has been rising for years – and so has the number in ‘deep poverty’, but without any response from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the new system created by the 1996 legislation.
Sam Gurney
The seasonal naming of protests around the world has gained a new addition with the beginning of the ‘Chilean Winter.’ The increasingly annoying journalistic short hand however doesn’t disguise the spreading wave of resistance to austerity measures round the world. In Chile the protests initiated by students against cuts to education funding and the massively divided two tier system in higher education have spread to involve the CUT, Chile’s main trade union centre, who have just held a two day national strike.
Owen Tudor
Today’s migration figures are understandably being seen as a further challenge to the Coalition Government’s rash pledge to bring down net immigration to under 100,000 a year. Actually immigration is falling, but less fast than emigration, so the net figure is going up (by 21% between 2009 and 2010). Work isn’t the key issue (of 575,000 people entering the country for the long-term, less than 20% were coming for work), and the work figures are further evidence of the continuing flatlining of the global economy.
During 2010, the number of people moving to the UK with a job already secured fell from its 2008 peak (ie before the recession) of 168,000 to 110,000, because there are fewer jobs on offer (and this is despite employer surveys suggesting that they are still keen to recruit migrant workers when they have jobs on offer). At the same time, people in the UK were less likely to move abroad for a job – 179,000 people did so, which is the lowest number since 2007 – suggesting that people don’t see much chance of finding a good job overseas either. It’s clearly grim everywhere.
Owen Tudor
The CBI’s Deputy Director General has opposed a Robin Hood Tax in Accountancy Age, but it’s a pretty feeble attack, and the most interesting thing about the article is that the web version contains lots of links – all adverts for HSBC! It rather suggests that Neil Bentley hasn’t done the reading, as most of his arguments have already been comprehensively rebutted. You do wonder whether he’s actually not that bothered about the tax being introduced, but feels he ought to look like he’s against it, to justify the finance sector’s’ membership subs! But for the record, here’s the rebuttal…
Owen Tudor
Politicians often bandy around international comparisons to demonstrate that the policies they are advocating have global support while their opponents are internationally isolated. Two comments spring to mind when reviewing the OECD’s latest growth estimates: first, if you are wrong, the fact that other people are wrong too may be some comfort, but it doesn’t mean you’re right; and second, when it comes to the international economy, when everyone is heading in the same direction, it almost always ends badly. What seems to be happening at the moment is a pretty much textbook case of a downward spiral in global demand and global growth, and that’s not good news even if it means the UK coalition government is in plenty of company.
Paul Sellers
“The impact of the public sector cuts on private sector jobs remains a concern. A total of 20% of private sector employers now say they will have either a quite serious or serious impact on them.” - Recruitment and Employment Confederation Jobs Outlook survey, 23 August 2011
The impact is twofold:
No surprise then that employers organisations (such as REC) are belatedly starting to worry about Government policy.
Owen Tudor
There is yet another report today (in the Financial Times) that bankbench Conservative MPs want to abandon the Coalition commitment to raise overseas aid to the UN recommended level of 0.7%, and we know many Conservatives are deeply concerned about the pledge (support is much stronger – but not universal – among Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs). So why are the Coalition still pledging the increase, and will they resist the pressure to renege on what was a manifesto commitment of all three parties?
Richard Exell
I have a post at Left Foot Forward, looking at the evidence that, after a positive start to the year, the labour market is now stagnating. If you look at hours worked, year-on-year changes in unemployment, the claimant count, flows on to Jobseeker’s Allowance, involuntary part-time and temporary work or the number of vacancies, they all point to stagnation at best. Given all this, it’s a shame that the number of people getting help from employment and training programmes has been falling since the election.
Scarlet Harris
Contrary to city economists’ optimistic predictions that today’s labour market figures would show a drop in unemployment, it seems that unemployment is stubbornly refusing to fall.
Women’s unemployment in particular saw a dramatic rise (21,000 on the quarter) taking the women’s ILO unemployment count to 1.05million – its highest level in 23 years.