On UK Hourly Wages

For Scott: I thought I’d done a post on this before but I had only prepared the graphs.  The ONS does not have an “official statistic” for nominal hourly wages, but they do publish some data in a spreadsheet in the Labour Market stats, which is updated quarterly.  The latest data available is from November 2012 [Excel spreadsheet], and comes with this caveat:

IMPORTANT NOTE REGARDING LFS EARNINGS ESTIMATES

Gross weekly and hourly earnings data are known to be underestimated in the LFS. This is principally because of proxy responses.

Also, respondents whose hourly pay is £100 or over are excluded from the estimates.

Graphing Scott’s preferred metric of tight money, mean nominal hourly wages to per capita NGDP works out as follows:

UK Hourly Wages to Nominal GDP

For that graph, I used the mean hourly wages from the above spreadsheet, the NGDP nominal GVA data from ONS series ABML [edit: note this is Nominal GVA at basic prices] and a population count from ONS series MGSL, which is 16+ population.  This is not ideal since both MGSL and the hourly wage data are not seasonally adjusted, whereas YBHA is.  If there is better data available please let me know!

The above is not a perfect fit for the unemployment rate, but it’s not bad.

UK Unemployment Rate. Source: ONS Series MGSX

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