Born in Britain: a reflection on government aspirations a decade on

Abstract

In light of substantial disadvantage faced by ethnic minorities, the UK government stated a decade ago that in 10 years’ time, ethnic minorities should no longer face disproportionate barriers to labour market achievement. From the investigation of the stock of native born ethnics conducted here, it is evident that such aspirations have not been realized.

Acknowledgements

Materials from the Labour Force Survey are made available by the Office of National Statistics through the Data Archive. Neither bears any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of the data reported here.

Notes

¹Heckman et al. (2000) is a good example of US work over an extended period. Leslie (1998) provides a comprehensive coverage of issues in the UK and Elliott and Lindley (2008) provides a nice counter-balance to our own work by focussing specifically upon immigrants.

²In the employment analysis, employment status (i.e. whether ILO unemployed or not) is regressed against age (and its square), a dummy for ill health, a dummy for pre-school children in household, marital status (3 dummies), region (6), highest educational qualification (6), housing tenure (4), number of children (4) and year (15).

³While some form of limited dependent choice model would be the more usual way of modelling the dichotomous choice between employment and nonemployment, a linear probability model is used here because it provides a more tractable way of approximating standard errors for the decomposition components. As it turns out, the nature of the results and the conclusions drawn are unaffected by the estimation strategy employed. Results are available on request.

⁴In the earnings analysis, log real hourly earnings are regressed against potential labour market experience (and its square), a dummy for ill health, a public sector dummy, marital status (3 dummies), region (6), highest educational qualification (6), job tenure (3), establishment size (6), industry (12) and year (15).

⁵For both analyses, model specifications are consistent with those of BLMO. Full details of the variables used and their definitions are given in Table A1.

⁶Consistent with BLMO, the analysis is for full-time employees.

⁷Such results are not reported here but are available on request.