Geospatial restructuring of industrial trade (GRIT): integration of secondary data to model geospatial economic responses to fuel price

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During the 21st century an energy revolution must take place to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Understanding the impact this revolution will have on the cost of goods and services is a vital challenge, but beset by speculation. However, we can be confident that efforts to decarbonise the economy, confront peak oil, and address fuel security, will results in substantive shifts in the price of energy. How will changes in future fuel prices impact upon economic activity across the UK? Which economic activities will experience the greatest pressure from rising fuel prices, and so which locations will have an economy most or least able to cope with future fuel prices? This project will create a new set of data, built on existing sources, to help generate answers and consider potential solutions. By working with business throughout, it will help strike a balance between a strategic look at the UK's spatial economy and understanding the challenges UK businesses will face. In Britain, over four million businesses rely on a web of connections to other establishments, as well as to their staff and customers. Each of these connections has its own cost: it takes energy and time to move goods across space. What will happen to that web if energy and fuel costs continue to increase? It is surprisingly hard to find answers based on data and analysis - in large part because data is so sparse. A great deal is known about the UK's economy at the national level, but little about how trade moves internally, at the regional scale and below. Lacking good data, it is difficult to investigate the larger picture. We do not know if business will respond to fuel price increases by focussing more on local markets, or if rising transport costs will be seen as an inevitable part of economic globalisation. Some argue that moving goods is such a small percentage of overall production costs, it hardly matters and can be ignored. Businesses are doing what they can to plan, given the evident uncertainties, but in using data they acquire from their own operations, their view is necessarily narrow. This project will therefore attempt to provide a more strategic, national overview of trade flows in the UK under changing fuel price scenarios. We will address economic activity disaggregated into 110 classes (SIC 2007) for the UK in 133 regions (NUTS 3 areas). To do this we will use the Business Structure Database that describes almost every business in the UK, and the national level 'Supply and Use' tables to develop trade flows between industrial sectors within the UK at a fine-grained geospatial level. This offers an exciting opportunity to develop new insights into the UK's spatial economy by creating a more detailed picture of the UK's economy than has previously been possible. We will use the resulting data to examine an important question: how will changing fuel costs alter the UK's economy spatially? This will be done at a broad level for the UK, and in detail for one particular sector, to prove the methodology. We expect the project data to be significant in providing insights into how the UK's economy changes spatially. This is very important to a range of critical activities, such as of infrastructure and utilities planning, and provision of housing and social services, as well as understanding the carbon emission implications of economic restructuring across the UK.