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To what extent does demographic change in the UK represent more of an opportunity than a threat to UK businesses?

Decent Essays

The UK economy is constantly changing for various reasons such as improvement in medicine and increased globalisation leading to people living longer and the UK economy becoming more diverse culturally. Whether or not it provides an opportunity or a threat to a business will largely depend upon how the management of the business decides to attempt to change because of the change of the demographics.
The largest change to the UK demographics would be the overall increase in the average age of the country, because of the innovation in medicine keeping people alive for longer and people not getting sick for long. This could provide many opportunities for a firm in the UK, either in sales or the management of the firm. A firm could change the …show more content…

With the UK being part of the European Union there is free movement of labour and capital throughout Europe; and because England has substantially better living conditions than some of the countries in Eastern Europe many migrants have come to England in search of jobs. This could provide large benefits to firms in the UK because these workers do not demand the same amount of money as the equivalent UK worker (because they have been brought up with less money and value it more so than UK residents) while also having a better work ethics, on average, than UK residents. The migrants are also more likely to take the jobs that UK workers view as “beneath them”, such as strawberry picking. This leads to huge reductions in costs to the firms working in these industries who can benefit from this cheap labour, having large reductions to the cost of production. Also the increase in the supply of employees means that potentially the average wage rate could reduce, with a larger amount of people vying for the same job the firms can get away with paying less. This coupled with the fact that the UK is currently in a recession, with large unemployment throughout the world, means that the firms have huge amounts of people to choose from when employing people. The increased amount of migrants in the UK economy also provides a new market for firms, with the migrants wanting national delicacies to eat. This has resulted in large amounts of eastern European

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