In Iceland, child care costs parents just 5 percent' income
Britain's unemployment crisis may seem like a long period of recovery from the pandemic.
It could easily be argued that Covid has left a once healthy nation struggling with millions of people reeling from the infection and unable to return to normal life. jobs that employers desperately need.
However, the pandemic has swept across the world, and many similar countries have returned with employment levels well above pre-2020 levels.
Jeremy Hunt says Britain could learn a thing or two from our neighbors when it comes to humility.
“Our inaction rate is 21.9%. In Iceland the figure is 13% and in the Netherlands it is 14%,” the chancellor said last week, referring to the proportion of working-age adults who are neither working nor looking for work.
“If you look Considering the policies of other countries, which are not completely different from ours, there are many things that can be done there.”
Cheap child care is one of them.
For an average-income couple with two children aged two and three, full-time childcare costs the equivalent of a quarter of a parent's income in the UK.
In Iceland, this amount is just 5 percent.
“This is extremely important,” says Jens Magnusson, chief economist at SEB bank. “It's hard to have high levels of women's participation in the workforce if you don't provide affordable child care.”
Mr Hunt plans to reduce costs for parents by increasing the number of subsidized daycare hours children are entitled to. from April and then again from September. This should help more working parents keep their jobs rather than dropping out of school to care for their children.
However, the Netherlands has a higher rate of flexible working than the UK.
More than a third of Dutch workers work part-time, compared with around a quarter of British workers.
>“In health and education, where many women work, full-time contracts are not necessarily the norm — part-time is,” says Marcel Klock, an economist at ING. “It could be two days, three days or five days, but you only work half a day.”
The result is a high level of participation: in the Netherlands more people work, but on average they work fewer hours.
Not only politics is important.
What is especially important is strong work. the ethic also took root in Iceland but has disappeared in Britain.
“Young people aged 16 to 24 are quite active, either working in the summer or working part-time at school,” says Robert Faresveit of Icelandic Confederation of Labor. “Work culture is one of the reasons.”
Schools in Iceland traditionally have long summer holidays to allow children to work during the peak fishing season.
More than three quarters of young Icelanders are active in the labor market. Three decades ago the same was true in the UK, but the UK figure has now dropped below 60%.
In Iceland, working life also ends late, helped by tradition and pension rules.
>Thor Gylfason, a professor of economics at the University of Iceland, says that in other countries people «work well beyond the mandatory retirement age, easily reaching the age of 70.»
This is helped by pension systems that are becoming more generous for those who refrain from making claims after reaching the age of 67.
However, this is also the result of tradition. For years, Icelanders had to work long hours to «keep up with the Joneses» (in their case, Denmark and Sweden), and the habit stuck, says Gylfason.
«It's just part of the Icelandic way of life.» to be, to work.”
Few today would say the same about Britain.
Свежие комментарии