MICHAEL ROBERTS—The UK has the widest regional disparities in wages in the whole of Europe. Indeed, people in north-east of England have an average standard of living less than half that of the average Londoner. Wealth is also unevenly spread across Great Britain. The South-East is the wealthiest of all regions with median household total wealth of £503,400, over twice the amount of wealth in households in the North of England.
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MICHAEL ROBERTS—All the Indonesian presidential candidates are promising upwards of 15 million new jobs in the next five years, in a country where about 3 million people enter the job market annually. But most estimates reckon that Indonesia needs 7% economic growth annually to churn out enough jobs for its young population and the growth forecast for the next two years is closer to 4% a year. Around 1,000 jobs were created for every trillion rupiah of investment in 2022, compared with 4,500 jobs in 2013.
These jobs are supposed to be generated by moving away from an economy based on mining, oil production and single crop agro exports (palm oil), which are mainly capital intensive to a more broad-based manufacturing and hi-tech economy like China or Vietnam.
