Wales’s swollen public sector

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With the UK economy continuing to "bump along the bottom", one must wonder what on earth is going on. Mismanagement, or rather the urge to completely manage the economy, has put us in terrible shape. Yet, look more closely and the picture is even more frightening.

It was reported in 2008, that 448,000 people, (25.1% of the potential working population), are recorded as economically inactive in Wales. This is above the national average of 21%, putting us at the bottom of the table. Essentially, these are people who are not presently seeking work or unavailable to start. It’s a rather alarming figure in itself, but there is much more. Welsh unemployment, 8.5% of the population, is also higher than the national average of 7.8%. Yet it gets much worse. Of the working population, just over 400,000 are employed directly by the public sector, coming in at just under 25% of the total. Again this is far higher than the National average. Such is the scale of the problem in Wales that roughly only 1/3 of our future economic growth will come from the private sector, a figure more suitably linked to the old Soviet Union.  MORE