Survey of self-employment and alternative work arrangements 2018

Machin, Stephen and Giupponi, Giulia (2021). Survey of self-employment and alternative work arrangements 2018. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-853979

1) Developing Skills: Strengths and Weaknesses in the System, and What can be Done.
The new Industrial Strategy must consider how the education system can create the general and specific skills needed by businesses today and in the future. CEP will synthesise evidence on strengths and weaknesses in the current education system at all levels (schools, colleges and universities), and highlight where improvements can be made. This might be within the current system, or through the design of new mechanisms to incentivise individuals and firms to invest in training. In conjunction with researchers from the Centre for Vocational Education Research (CVER), we can produce a synthesis of findings on technical and vocational education. We will also be able to study in more depth firm-level relationships with higher education institutions, with the aim of better understanding how they impact on local economies.
2) Driving Growth across the Country: Mapping the Data on Firms and Labour Markets.
The starting point for developing appropriate regionally focused growth policies is to understand the status quo, to carefully document how this has changed over time, and to better understand the factors underlying and driving geographic differences. The CEP is developing better data to describe the geographic spread of industry, and associated variation in labour market patterns like problems of real wage stagnation and the rise of new types of work arrangements, including the gig economy. As well as analysis of the digital economy, and the opportunities and threats it poses for the labour market and implications for the future. We will seek to release reports describing the data, map the relevant metrics (including productivity, investment, employment and pay) so that policymakers and stakeholders could benchmark their own regions/sectors.
3) Supporting Businesses to Start and Grow: Drivers of Innovation and Diffusion.
The Industrial Strategy should be focused on addressing market failures which cause barriers to investment in innovation, technologies or organisational practices that drive productivity growth. One strand of work using patents will analyse the innovation spill overs between technologies and places, and the types of policy that stimulate business RD and innovation. The spill over analysis would also be linked with new measures of regional Total Factor Productivity (TFP) to understand the local economic impact of innovation. This work will help guide policymakers to where the payoffs of RD investment might be greatest for the UK. In this context, we would consider payoffs both in terms of economic growth but also in terms of achieving non-economic objectives such as lower greenhouse gas emissions and more secure energy supply. We also plan to produce a report together with the LSE's Grantham Institute on clean growth. Another strand of work will consider the role of financial constraints on firm growth, and the extent to which these have contributed to recent poor productivity performance in the UK. And finally, we will explore the relationships between management practices and investment efficiency.
4) Encouraging Trade and Inward Investment: Brexit and Industrial Strategy.
Many UK firms (particularly SMEs) face longstanding barriers to exporting, and Brexit will create new challenges in this area. At the same time, while UK Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) performance has been stronger to date, there are concerns that Brexit will induce multinationals to relocate in order to maintain access to the single market. CEP will seek to understand the likely trade and FDI impacts of Brexit, and the implications for labour markets and consumers. This will include a deeper analysis of the sectoral and regional dimensions, and should be useful to inform the scope and form of industrial policy response.

Data description (abstract)

This survey intends to fill a gap by carefully documenting the characteristics of the workers engaged in alternative work arrangements and the gig economy in the United Kingdom. We collected the data via an online survey of 20,000 respondents representative of the UK working-age population (18-65 years old). Alternative work arrangements, such as independent contractors, zero hours contract workers, temporary help agency workers and contract company workers, are a growing and increasingly important feature of the labour markets of many developed economies. However, little is known about the nature and variety of these new types of jobs in terms of employment conditions (e.g. pay, hours worked, patterns of work), workers’ characteristics including workers’ preferences for different working arrangements, and employment rights.

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