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A curious thing is likely to happen next week: Donald Trump may be given positive titles as a result of a record immigration. Perhaps still a more curious, similar phenomenon in the UK instead of gives Keiru Starmer and Rachel Reeves a headache.
In both cases, the narrative is formed according to how the statistics of the labor market deals with the discovery that the population is greater than it has been realized before. But it is played in different ways on two sides of the Atlantic.
In the last quarter of the British National Statistics Office, he revised his estimates Net immigration During the two years that ended in December 2023, calculating that about 300,000 more people were originally thought to have arrived in the UK, which is a 20 -pointed blow. This increase as well as some updated assumptions below the surface, nourished in revised Population projections published earlier this week.
If that sounds like a big adjustment, the US Census Office has increased its estimates of net immigration by 2022 and 2023. 90 percentfrom 2.1 million to 4mn, adding another 2.8 mn for 2024. fastest in decades.
Be clear: the fact that these are revision A good thing happens. In both cases is the way in which immigration is touched improves, it helps to install administratively dataas accurate and timely as the source based on a survey. In any case, it is far better to have audits and more precisely numbers, than no audit and still wrong numbers.
But significant shifts like these do not only change what we thought we knew about the size of the population and the growth rates. They also affect economic indicators, not the least important statistics of the labor market.
Next Friday a month USThe first of Trump’s second term will include a raft audit in the basic information about the survey, including the dramatic adaptation of the population size.
Analyzes from Brookings institution and Eatan earlier senior economist under Joe Biden, indicates that the opposite reports Last year, new figures are likely to show that Americans born in birth do not lose their labor market compared to immigrants. In fact, the employment of born in the US is growing.
Old, wrong low population figures Artificially reduced evaluated employment levels obtained from a major American economic household research, which is why it seems that the US employment has fallen. In reality, the growth of the population was so high that, although the share of native born, the born born number still increased.
A similar audit atlantic has a very different impact. Well -published problems with British workforce survey means that the UK is increasingly leaning with administrative data take the labor market temperature. And that shows that the number of employees of workers at a working age was equal to the majority of last year, before the dipping.
What is crucial, since these figures are based on tax records, not the proportions derived from the survey, the unexpectedly high population only increases the denominator only in the rate of employment, not both sides of the equation as in the US. As a result, the stagnated tasks in the UK turn into extremely exacerbation under the conditions of labor market when viewed on the background of robust immigration directed population growth.
The number of employees of workers in the UK has been reduced by 0.2 percentage points from year to year, but expressed as a proportion of the population, the fall is almost full percentage point-on-out 2008Pandemia aside. Where the rapid dismissal of the labor market in 2008 is mostly guided by a reduced counter (loss of jobs), this one comes primarily from wider denominators (arrivals without work).
The depth of this fall is probably the lower limit, because some recent arrivals may be self -employed or in other types of employment that British job information is struggling to capture. But the general image of population growth surpassed the growth of jobs clear.
Although statistics like the number of people and workers in the country may feel solid, a series of audits and methodological differences indicate the fluttering nature of many narratives that form around them. The picture becomes more precise over time, but there will be blurry moments on the way.
