Eastern European immigrants in the UK

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Rosso

PurposeThe paper aims at examining wage developments among Eastern European immigrants vs UK natives before and after the 2004 enlargement by measuring the extent to which inter-group wage differentials are explainable by these groups' changing attributes or by differences in returns to these characteristics. The enlargement has been a defining moment in British recent history and may have contributed to the unfolding of the events that have culminated in Brexit.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses a quantitative analysis of the immigrant–native wage gap across the entire distribution by applying the methodology known as the unconditional quantile regression. The analysis is performed before and after the 2004 European Union enlargement to Eastern countries. The data used is the British Labour Force Survey (UK LFS) from 1998 to 2008.FindingsAt all distribution points, a major role is played by occupational downgrading, which increases over time. The results further suggest that the decreased wage levels at the top of the distribution stem mainly from low transferability of skills acquired in the source country.Research limitations/implicationsThe UK LFS does not allow to follow individuals for a long period of time. For this reason, the main limitation of the study is the impossibility to measure for individual-level trajectories in their labour market integration and to account for return migration.Originality/valueThe analysis provides a detailed picture of the wage differences between Eastern European immigrants and natives along the whole wage distribution. The paper also identifies possible causes of the wage gap decrease for EU8 immigrant workers after 2008.

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (7) ◽  
pp. 1319-1346
Author(s):  
Xisco Oliver ◽  
Maria Sard

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse the wage gap between temporary and permanent workers across the whole wage distribution, not just at the mean, and the evolution before and after the Great Recession on this gap in Spain. Design/methodology/approach An extended Mincer-type wage equation is estimated using ordinary least square regression and unconditional quantile regression. Then, the decomposition of the wage gap between workers with fixed-term and permanent contracts for each quantile is made using the Fortin, Lemieux and Firpo decomposition. Findings The results show that two workers, with identical characteristics, earn different salaries if they have a different type of contract. However, the wage gap is not constant across the wage distribution. The penalty for temporary workers is wider for higher wages. Moreover, the main part of the gap is due to observed characteristics, but other factors (unobserved characteristics and discrimination) become more relevant in the upper part of the wage distribution. Originality/value The study expands upon available studies for Spain in two points. First, it is the first paper to the knowledge that analyse both the wage gap between temporary and permanent workers across the wage distribution and its decomposition. Second, the paper explores what happened before and after the Great Recession. In the years that the paper analyses there is also a labour market reform.


2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 306-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neli Demireva ◽  
Christel Kesler

The article focuses on transitions between employment and not working among immigrants, the second generation and British-born Whites. We find evidence of lower stability in employment for New Commonwealth, Middle Eastern and Turkish immigrants. This penalization holds also for the second generation, especially in terms of exiting unemployment. On the other hand, no disadvantage is noted for labour immigrants from countries recently accessed to the EU such as Romanians and Bulgarians; or, if penalization is observed in the transition matrices, it disappears with controls for personal and labour market characteristics as is the case for EU8 and Eastern European immigrants. The continuous penalization of immigrants in Britain is confirmed; however, a dynamic perspective emphasizes that some immigrants, such as those from Eastern Europe, are less penalized than is observed in cross-sectional analyses.


Author(s):  
Izabella Lecka ◽  
Viktoriya Pantyley ◽  
Liudmila Fakeyeva ◽  
Alexandrina Cruceanu

The study concerns the relationship between health and geopolitics in the United Kingdom (UK). To demonstrate this relationship, we examined the subject and tone of articles published in the popular media (on the example of tabloid the Daily Mail) in 2006–2020 concerning health and medical care, and the health and health care practice of Eastern European immigrants belonging to and not belonging to the European Union (EU). There was an increase in media criticism of the behaviour of immigrants in the years 2014–2017, in the period around the referendum in favour of the UK leaving the EU (Brexit). Attention was drawn to the media’s use of a Belief in a Zero-Sum Game (BZSG) narrative at that time. On both sides, “hosts” and the “guests”, a progressive anomy process was observed, degrading the behaviour of individuals and social groups.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lixin Cai

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to enhance understanding labour supply dynamics of the UK workers by examining whether and to what extent there is state dependence in the labour supply at both the extensive and intensive margins.Design/methodology/approachA dynamic two-tiered Tobit model is applied to the first seven waves of Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study. The model used accounts for observed and unobserved individual heterogeneity and serially correlated transitory shocks to labour supply to draw inferences on state dependence.FindingsThe results show that both observed and unobserved individual heterogeneity contributes to observed inter-temporal persistence of the labour supply of the UK workers, and the persistence remains after these factors are controlled for, suggesting true state dependence at both the extensive and intensive margins of the labour supply. The study also finds that at both the margins, the state dependence of labour supply is larger for females than for males and that for both genders the state dependence is larger for people with low education, mature aged workers and people with long-standing illness or impairment. The results also show that estimates from a conventional Tobit model may produce misleading inferences regarding labour supply at the extensive and intensive margins.Originality/valueThis study adds to the international literature on labour supply dynamics by providing empirical evidence for both the extensive and intensive margins of labour supply, while previous studies tend to focus on the extensive margin of labour force participation only. Also, unlike earlier studies that often focus on females, this study compares labour supply dynamics between males and females. The study also compares the estimates from the more flexible two-tiered Tobit model with that from the conventional Tobit model.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafizur Rahman ◽  
Md. Al-Hasan

This article undertakes an examination of Bangladesh’s latest available Quarterly Labour Force Survey 2015–2016 data to draw in-depth insights on gender wage gap and wage discrimination in Bangladesh labour market. The mean wage decomposition shows that on average a woman in Bangladesh earns 12.2 per cent lower wage than a man, and about half of the wage gap can be explained by labour market discrimination against women. Quantile counterfactual decomposition shows that women are subject to higher wage penalty at the lower deciles of the wage distribution with the wage gap varying between 8.3 per cent and 19.4 per cent at different deciles. We have found that at lower deciles, a significant part of the gender wage gap is on account of the relatively larger presence of informal employment. Conditional quantile estimates further reveal that formally employed female workers earn higher wage than their male counterparts at the first decile but suffer from wage penalty at the top deciles. JEL: C21, J31, J46, J70


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