Core Cities’ strong growth in the 2010s: Were they ‘leaving behind’ the rest of their regions?

Alan Townsend and Tony Champion
Additional contact information
Alan Townsend: Durham University, UK

Local Economy, 2020, vol. 35, issue 6, 566-585

Abstract: Second-order cities are generally seen as disadvantaged places in the literature on globalisation, but in recent years they have staged a revival in several countries. This article uses two data sources to examine the employment change recorded by Britain’s Core Cities between 2012 and 2017, breaking it down by type of worker, occupation and industry. It aims, firstly, to identify which elements of their growth are distinctive compared to the country as a whole and, secondly, to see how far their growth has been emulated by the areas around them that contain the majority of Britain’s ‘left-behind’ places. The article demonstrates the great strides made by the nine provincial cities combined, substantially exceeding the national rate of increase for male, female, full-time, part-time, employee and self-employed work, notably in the three highest status occupational groups and in all industrial sectors apart from manufacturing and transport, especially business services. It is also found that their growth outstripped that of their local, regional and EU comparators, underlining the importance of direct policy intervention for ‘left-behind’ places rather than relying on ‘trickle-down’ processes, especially given uncertainties about the sustainability of Core City growth in the wake of COVID-19 and Brexit.

Keywords: Core Cities; employment growth; Great Britain; left-behind places; second-order cities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269094220970913 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:loceco:v:35:y:2020:i:6:p:566-585

DOI: 10.1177/0269094220970913

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Local Economy from London South Bank University
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().