Atlantic Aspirations: What does the US get for being a third richer than the UK? F

SOCIAL MARKET FOUNDATION HOW MUCH RICHER IS THE US THAN THE UK? Britain’s relative economic decline has been a source of angst in the country since the late 19th Century, with a further resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s.1 However, with economic growth slowing to a crawl over the past 15 years, the UK’s failure to match higher incomes across the Atlantic have drawn particular attention and generate. [...] Except for a brief period in the 1930s when the US was struggling with the Great Depression, British GDP per capita has been approximately 30% below the United States since the end of the First World War. [...] excluding production by the government, households, non-profits, and farms) was 22% higher than its 2008 level.7 The equivalent figure for the UK, which includes agricultural output but excludes the NHS, is a meagre 6.8%.8i To understand the real-life consequences of this growing divide between the UK and the US, I use data from the purchasing power parity (PPP) benchmarks produced by the Internat. [...] i NB: The definition of ‘market sector’ differs slightly between the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) owing to the different structures of the UK and US economies, particularly in the healthcare industry, but this shouldn’t make a big difference here. [...] Table 1, below, shows the level of per capita consumption in each category as of the 2017 PPP benchmark in the US and the UK.