Income Inequality In The United Kingdom: A Case Study

There are a number of reasons why the United Kingdom displays an unfair distribution of wealth despite there being an efficient allocation of resources. In 2013, the top 1% of the British population held just under 20% of all wealthy while the top 50% owned over 90% of the marketable wealth (Lipsey and Chrystal, 2013). Therefore, there is traditionally a high rate of income inequality within the UK. Prior to the Great Recession of the 2000s, income inequality was decreasing across the United Kingdom. Indeed, Lipsey and Chrystal (2013) asserts that the trend of wealth inequality "was slowed, if not reversed, in the last two decades of that [the twentieth] century, largely because of the build up of pension in the hands of 50-70 year-olds". Wealth inequality in the United Kingdom was quite high in 2016, with the top 10% having an income that is twenty-four times larger than the poorest 10%; the poorest fifth of society have
e. disabled individuals or single mothers), (Piketty, 2014). Further, the opportunity-cost within the United Kingdom is also higher than the nations mentioned above as the free marker is allowed to run with little to no regulation. Therefore, the ability for rewards is higher but also the cost if an opportunity fails. There is similarly an inequality of opportunity with lower levels of opportunity and limited social mobility for the lower classes (Atkinson, 2015); the UK government has attempted in some ways to mitigate this inequality through things like paying university tuitions while students are in school, which will be discussed further later in this work. However, Martin (2012) indicates that the opportunity-cost of these programmes in the United Kingdom is quite high as adding social programmes of this kind to mitigate wealth inequality will cost other