Yesterday, MPs voted to approve raising employees’ National Insurance Contributions (NICs) by 1.25 percentage points, breaking a key manifesto promise not to raise taxes. While the government marketed the rise as “progressive”, in reality it is an intergenerationally unfair tax reform which will affect younger generations the most. Lizzie Simpson, IF Researcher, explains. A regressive… Read more »
Category: Economics
Overqualified and underemployed: a sombre snapshot of the labour market for young people
Graduates are leaving university with scant prospects, feeling let down by policy-makers and waking up to the generational divide. Carlotta Hartmann, IF Intern, investigates the labour market pressures facing young Brits today Graduates feeling let down Young people across OECD countries have been disproportionately affected by the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to… Read more »
National insurance, intergenerational fairness and paying for social care
Robert Ashton looks at how National Insurance could be changed for the better, raising more money to pay for social care without penalising younger generations, many of whom are already paying a greater part of their incomes than previous generations on high rents and student loan repayments. How can we make National Insurance work better… Read more »
What does fewer births mean for intergenerational fairness?
Conceptions are falling in England and Wales. Liz Emerson, IF Co-founder, looks at the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Latest data released by the ONS show a 2.1% fall in the number of conceptions in England and Wales between 2018 and 2019. This was the largest annual decrease since 2012.… Read more »
It’s time for post-COVID payback for Australia’s young people
Australia has been called a “lucky country” thanks to very low COVID-19 deaths, but that has come at an economic cost to younger Australians who have not fared well. Think Forward, a newly established lobby group for young Australians who want politicians to prioritise and take action on issues of intergenerational fairness, argues that young… Read more »
What should a post-pandemic economic recovery look like for younger generations?
In this contribution to IF’s Worldwide Blog Week, Chris Wongsosaputro, Co-Chair of the Young Fabians Economy & Finance Network, calls on the government response to COVID-19 to focus on improving younger generations’ skill sets Young people hit hardest In economic terms, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted young people more than other generations. Figures from the… Read more »
Intergenerational fairness: an economic approach
Matthew Oulton, Secretary of the UK’s Young Fabians Economy and Finance Network, economics student and young Labour activist from the Wirral, joins IF’s Worldwide Blog Week to discuss, from a left perspective, how to achieve intergenerational fairness post COVID-19 After a year of locking up the young largely to save the old, it’s hard to… Read more »
What should a post-COVID-19 recovery should look like for young people in Germany?
In this contribution to IF’s worldwide blog week, Jörg Tremmel, Co-founder of Germany’s Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations, looks at a post-corona-Germany in three decisive policy fields: public health, public debt and the climate crisis. Public health SARS-CoV-2 has changed fundamentally the level of acceptance for rigid public health measures in Germany (as… Read more »
Generation Covid: how can we build back better and fairer across generations?
In this article, Tan Suee Chieh, Immediate Past-President of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, explains how young people globally could become a “lost generation” unless policy shifts towards prioritising the long term. During a war it is usually the young who are sent to do the fighting. If you view the pandemic as a… Read more »
You may say “jam tomorrow”. But we say, “share today”
In this contribution to IF’s Worldwide Blog Week, IF supporter and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford, Danny Dorling, argues that rather than promising growth tomorrow, policy-makers should give more to younger generations today Slowing GDP growth We tend to assume that there… Read more »