There are many more women in the workforce now, but while women used to have higher unemployment rates than men, that is no longer the case. And while younger workers tend to have less stable employment patterns and higher unemployment rates than older workers, the working population is, on net, only a little bit older now than it was in the late 1960s.
The Bank’s most recent forecast, published at the time of our last MPC meeting, is that economic growth will average 1,7 per cent for 2014. This is approximately 1 percentage point lower than what was envisaged at the beginning of the year.