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Fruits of Their Labor.(Business)(British economy)
Byline: William Underhill
Fifteen years of record growth is finally changing what it means to be middle class in Britain.
A quiz for the world traveler: Which country downs the most champagne outside France? Which boasts the world's most expensive shopping street? Where in Europe did average salaries rise fastest in the first years of the decade? Which of the world's leading economies now has (by some measures) the world's highest living standards? The answer to each: Britain.
Gray old Blighty may still be damper than America and many parts of Europe, but it is no longer poorer. Over the past several years, Britain's per capita income has roared ahead of its Continental neighbors'. Now, for the first time in a decade, Britons have become more prosperous even than Americans. According to the British consultancy Oxford Economics, per capita income in Britain will reach $48,000 in 2008, compared with $47,300 in the United States. That's about 8 percent higher than France and Germany, reversing the position of the early 1990s, when Britain was emerging painfully from its last recession. For good measure, it's comfortably ahead of its major rivals in Asia and leads the world's economic heavyweights. "Britain just feels like a completely different country from 1992," says Adrian Cooper of Oxford Economics. "This is now a world-leading, dynamic place in a way that it never was before."
No one who's visited London in the past decade could doubt it--$10 lattes, $2 million studio flats and oligarchs escorting supermodels abound. But Britain's prosperity has expanded far beyond its glitzy expatriate-packed capital. Many Northern cities are booming, and the middle class throughout the nation spends in a way that would have shocked their postwar predecessors. British motorists now buy more Mercedeses and BMWs per head than Americans. Handbag sales are up 146 percent since 2002. In the past four years, spending on long-haul holidays to the Caribbean and the United States has risen more than 40 percent. Spending on restaurants is up 18 percent since 2002.
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Source: HighBeam Research, Fruits of Their Labor.(Business)(British economy)