1/10 Wages are struggling to keep up with costs. Covid and Ukraine are factors but to explain what’s happening, we also need to look further back – to Britain’s levels of wage growth, productivity, investment and inequality. This is what we found. First - wage growth has stalled 
2/10 According to Torsten Bell at the Resolution Foundation, a think tank focused on low-to middle incomes, this "stagnation" is "almost completely unprecedented. Nobody thought it could happen".
3/10 Next - if you want wages to rise, productivity is crucial. As economist Mohamed El-Erian puts it: "the more you produce, the more you get rewarded for it". But as you can see here, UK productivity is growing more slowly than the average across developed countries.
4/10 Or if you want specific examples - here you can see how the UK compares with Germany and France.
5/10 One way of driving an increase in productivity is to increase investment by both the government and business. This graphic shows a list of developed countries and their level of investment as a proportion of their economy from 1997-2017. The UK is last.
6/10 Also, the government’s independent watchdog, the OBR, says that the uncertainty that followed the Brexit vote in 2016 has been a factor with investment. It notes that a number of factors have meant that 'business investment has stagnated since 2016'.
7/10 All of this has had consequences. In 2008, the typical German household’s annual income was £591 more than the typical UK household’s. Now the gap is over £4,000.
8/10 Or look at it another way. The think tank the Resolution Foundation calculates that stalling wage growth in the last 15 years has left British workers £11,000 worse off per year.
9/10 In last week’s budget, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said, "The declinists are wrong and the optimists are right. We stick to the plan because the plan is working". And the Treasury told us that the UK economy has ‘proven more resilient than many had expected’.
10/10 Watch the full edition of Panorama: Surviving the Pay Squeeze on @BBCiPlayer here. bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod…
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