Summary: The Great Recession

The Great Recession has impacted on households, businesses and government departments with unequal force. Some sectors have been severely adversely affected while others have escaped relatively lightly. What are the main economic problems arising from these differing experiences? Explain carefully your arguments.

The Great recession, which started in Britain in the second quarter of 2008, has affected national and sub-national economies in different measures, causing a great unevenness in the way in which these different groups have been affected by the economic downturn. This paper covers an overview of analyses used in economic research to help understand the economic problems Britain is currently facing as a result of this imbalance.
The British Labour Market has faced a period of prolonged high unemployment with devastating effects on market functions and the businesses that support it thereof. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) notes that the resilience of employment is critical when addressing issues that deal with the recession, since it has fallen far less than GDP. Labour market data show that many Britons remain unemployed and many more working for shorter hours than they would prefer to. The unemployment rate has been adversely affected since 2008 and its improvement is sluggish, unlike in previous recessions. Britain narrowly escaped a triple-dip recession in 2008, one effect of which is evident the graph (Source: IFS) shows average real hourly wages, comparing it with those of the 1979 and 1990 recessions.
At the current rates of growth, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has predicted it could take at least a decade to re-establish the unemployment rate of the pre-recession period. In quarter 2 of 2009, the redundancy rate rose and jobs in the workforce reduced over all the UK between Quarters 2 of 2008 and 2010 (ONS,
An effect of this recession is that government departments have faced discretionary cuts and restricted budgets (Sage, 2013). Many governmental and intergovernmental departments have been severely affected by the impacts of an unequal distribution of the recession, particularly in budget cuts, for instance, educational cuts in the department for education. Fiscal Crisis has ensued in departmental budgets due to the decreased total revenue and higher demand for public services. In March 2009, a report by British think tank Economist Intelligence Unit forecasted that the UK, amongst other countries, will face disrupted economies, social upheavals and toppled governments within the following two years. Despite its imbalances, Britain has fared better than some of its economic counterparts on that