UK City Regions - How Competitive in a Global Economy: What Do the Secondary Data Tell Us?

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This study will encourage a more informed debate about the territorial shape of the UK economy and the contribution of city regions to national economic competitiveness. There is growing research and policy interest in the economic contribution that different kinds of cities make to national and international economic competitiveness. The project would contribute to this research and policy debate by analysing a series of databases created by Eurostat, the OECD, and DG Regio. The project would capitalise upon some of our earlier research studies, which all made a policy impact. In recent months, datasets have become available from Eurostat and the OECD which provide more up to date data, on agreed boundaries, for a wider set of European and international city regions and a wider set of indicators and allow us to update our findings. The project would be rooted in the analytic framework we have developed in recent years on the roots of place competitiveness and would focus on the drivers of urban economic growth and competitiveness: innovation, infrastructure, sectoral mix and economic diversity, skilled and adaptable workforce, connectivity, place quality and strategic governance capacity. We will focus on key performance measures such as GDP, labour market and demographic trends and on indicators of the key drivers of competitiveness - innovation, skills, economic diversity and connectivity. We will use data from three sources: (i) Eurostat's regions and cities database; (ii) the OECD's city region database; and (iii) the Urban Audit's 'Larger Urban Zone' data collection. Our focus is principally on the 2000-10 decade, allowing us to explore developments before and during the current economic crisis.The data analysis will build upon the methodology developed by OECD for the analysis of regional economic performance but will be applied at a different spatial level - city regions. It will have two separate but related elements: benchmarking, which will concentrate upon patterns of economic performance; and regression analysis, which will concentrate upon the relationships between performance and key drivers of competitiveness. Benchmarking will involve comparisons of city region groupings based on both levels of GDP per capita at the start of the period and growth rates over the period as a whole. The performance of these city region groupings will then be assessed in relation to the drivers of competitiveness. The aim of this element of the analysis will be to compare performance by starting point and growth rates - benchmarking faster and slower growing city regions at each level of development against one another in relation to our drivers. The regression analysis will correlate city region growth rates with initial baseline GDP per capita levels and the drivers of competitiveness with city region growth levels and rates. The aim would be to identify patterns of convergence or divergence by both levels of GDP per capita and growth and to single out the role of individual drivers across the groupings. The data analysis as a whole will enable us to:- Benchmark the performance of UK city-regions against European and international counterparts.- Compare city region performance with national and regional economic performance.- Compare city region performance before and during the crisis.- Correlate city region growth with levels of development. - Correlate drivers of competitiveness with economic performance. We will also develop the OECD methodology by introducing a wider geographical and governance context. For example, we will examine patterns of city regional performance across broad European geographies - North, South, East and West. We will also examine the performance of city regions in different kinds of national governance arrangements, building upon our existing analysis of federal, regionalised, Nordic, unitary and unitary centralised systems.