Economic Inactivity in Wales, 2007

Statistics on Economic Inactivity includes January - March quarterly data, for Wales and the UK for the period 1984 - 2008 and annual data at Welsh local authority level for the period ending December 2007. The latest release updates the statistics previously released on 25 October 2006.

The key points from the latest release are:

• There have been two main periods where the inactivity rate for Wales has fallen below 25 per cent. The first was at the beginning of the 1990's, when it was accompanied by a fall in the UK inactivity rate, and the other has been in the most recent years, where it has been below 25 per cent for 5 of the last 6 years.
• There has been an upward trend in the inactivity rate for men and a downward trend for women over the 24 year period in both Wales and the UK. Women continue to have higher inactivity rates than men, but the gap between them has more than halved since 1984.
• Over the last five years, inactivity rates for men in Wales have shown no clear trend. On average the rate has been around 21 per cent, 4 percentage points higher than for the UK as a whole.
• The inactivity rate for women in Wales has continued to fall in recent years, from around 33 per cent at the beginning of the decade to around 27 per cent in the latest period. The rate in Spring 2008 was around 1 percentage point above the UK rate.
• The major difference in economic inactivity between Wales and the UK was in the percentage of people inactive through long-term limiting illness. This was particularly the case for those aged 50 and over.
• The presence of large numbers of full-time students around university locations had a distorting effect on comparisons between local areas in Wales. When full-time students are excluded, Neath Port Talbot had the highest inactivity rate amongst Welsh local authorities (28.2 per cent) and Monmouthshire and the Vale of Glamorgan had the joint lowest (16.7 per cent).

The analyses are based on the Labour Force Survey and the Annual Population Survey.

Contact:
Tel: 029 2082 5817
E-mail: economic.stats@wales.gsi.gov.uk

Next Update:
November 2010 (provisional - to be confirmed on the Due Out Soon page)