This suggests these gains have come principally from rises in property and pension wealth. In other words, the gains have been skewed towards those in society who own their own home or who have sizable pension pots. That skewed wealth picture is confirmed if we look at measures of median, as opposed to mean, wealth using household-level data (Chart 10). Since 2006, average net household wealth has risen by around 25%, from £ to £ Over the same period, median household wealth has increased more modestly, by around 15%, from £ to £ Overall, then, although the aggregate data suggest a fairly robust recovery, a drill-down paints a more nuanced picture. The rising economic tide has not lifted all boats. Indeed, a sizable fraction of households have seen no recovery in their disposable incomes, a rise in job insecurity and at best modest rises in their wealth. For them, the “recovery puzzle” may not be  5  Gallie D et al (2016). 6  Gregg and Gardiner (2015)  7  Gallie, Felstead, Green and Inanc (2016)  8  Citizens Advice (2016). BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  so puzzling. These data also suggest that distributional factors may be important when understanding “whose recovery”. Let me now turn to those. Disaggregating the jigsaw There are a number of ways in which the economic jigsaw can be rearranged to provide a different picture of the UK’s economic fortunes.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  depression. 5 And there have been several notable shifts in the nature of employment which may have affected people’s satisfaction with their job. One is in the changing nature of employment. The number of people in self-employment has risen from 3.6 million in 2005 to around 4.7 million today and so, less dramatically, have numbers of workers on temporary contracts. Those on zero-hours contracts have risen from 120,000 to 800,000. Some of this shift in employment practices is likely to have been a voluntary choice by workers to increase their job flexibility – for example, those nearing retirement or returning to work after childcare seeking part-time employment. But this is not the full story. Around 15% of those working part-time would prefer to be in full-time employment. And around a third of those on temporary contracts would prefer to be on permanent contracts. For those individuals, the darkside of labour flexibility – job insecurity – may be being felt. Some measures of job insecurity are consistent with that. For example, job insecurity would tend to lower the likelihood of people moving jobs. 6 As Chart 6 shows, job-to-job flows began rising slowly after 2010 but remain at levels well below their pre-crisis levels. Meanwhile, surveys suggest around a quarter of workers currently are afraid of losing their jobs, the highest level in several decades. 7 Citizens Advice has recently estimated that around 4.5 million workers in England and Wales are in insecure employment.