LONDON, July 4 (Xinhua) -- The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) revealed that the British economy is performing well enough to produce record employment figures, but poor productivity growth remains a problem.
The OECD's Economic Outlook report published on Wednesday showed that employment in the British economy had reached an all-time high of 66.7 percent of the population in the first quarter of this year, about 5 percentage points higher than than the OECD average.
The jobless rate was correspondingly very low, at 4.1 percent, notably lower than other OECD members such as France, which is currently at 8.9 percent.
The employment rate is projected to remain constant at 66.1 percent throughout most of 2018 and 2019.
However, a slight deterioration of labour market conditions is expected to increase the unemployment rate to 4.6 percent, bringing it closer to the OECD average of 5.1 percent by the end of 2019.
"Employment has been very strong in Britain," Mark Pearson, senior OECD economist told Xinhua.
"The UK has an increasingly flexible labor market -- particularly for women, older workers and disabled people who have more support than in the past and there is probably less discrimination against ethnic minorities than before," said Pearson.
The OECD report identified the gap between pay for women and men as a distinct disadvantage of the British economy.
Pearson said: "Britain is doing poorly," even compared with the average of OECD members.
"There is still an hourly wage gap between women and men but that is not the most important thing. The number of hours worked over a year is more important and women in Britain are much more likely to be working part-time than other better-performing economies."
Pearson said that even if that hourly pay gap was narrowed to zero and women were paid the same as men they would not earn as much because women "don't work the hours that men do."
Pearson said: "This is not because they do not want to work but it is to do with things like childcare."
The frequency of low incomes is close to the OECD average, with 10 percent of working-age persons living with less than 50 percent of the median income.
The report noted that this reflects a relatively high proportion of working-age households which are "jobless" or have low market incomes, with net incomes augmented by means-tested benefits.
Pearson said: "In Britain we have seen very little in the way of wage growth and of productivity growth, there are still far too many people who have inadequate skills for today's job market and until that is addressed it is hard to have growth, high employment and high productivity.
"For the moment Britain has managed to produce jobs for people with low skills but those are also jobs of low productivity. They have low wages."
