Ethnic minorities in the UK: burden or benefit?

This paper investigates the degree of the labour market competition between White and ethnic minority labour using four waves of the British Quarterly Labour Force Survey (1997). The extent of the labour market competition is examined in terms of wage elasticities and elasticities of complementarity using translog production technology. The estimations suggest that ethnic minority labour is complementary to most of White workers. The substitution relationship is especially evident between ethnic minority labour on the one hand and low skilled, medium skilled non-manual and low skilled manual White labour on the other hand. Ethnic minorities do not seem to be substitute for each other. Helpful comments from Richard Berthoud, Stephen Drinkwater, Joop Hartog, Stephen Wheatley Price and participants in the Monday afternoon seminar at Institute for Social and Economic Research, the University of Essex, is gratefully acknowledged. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This paper is based on work carried out during a visit to the European Centre for Analysis in the Social Sciences (ECASS) at the University of Essex, supported by the European Commission Training and Mobility of Researchers-Access to Large Scale Facilities Programme. Material from the Labour Force Survey is Crown Copyright; has been made available by the Office for National Statistics through the Data Archive and has been used by permission. Neither the ONS nor The Data Archive bears any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of the data reported here. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A. Zorlu/Ethnic minorities in the UK (2000), 2