Industrial policy, productivity and place: London as a ‘role model’ and High Speed 2 (HS2)

Dan Coffey, Carole Thornley and Philip R. Tomlinson

Regional Studies, 2023, vol. 57, issue 6, 1171-1183

Abstract: Britain’s industrial strategy, preoccupied with labour productivity, projects London as a role model because of a high gross value added (GVA) to employment ratio, an approach since followed in the national ‘levelling-up’ agenda. We demonstrate that this is misplaced: it misses the subtleties of how positive agglomeration effects act and ignores how negative effects can, for distributional reasons, cause real as well as GVA-measured productivity to rise in a misleading way. We consider the implications for both London and infrastructure projects designed to reduce productivity differentials by improving connectivity with other cities, such as the ambitious but flawed High Speed 2 (HS2).

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00343404.2022.2110226 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:regstd:v:57:y:2023:i:6:p:1171-1183

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CRES20

DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2022.2110226

Access Statistics for this article

Regional Studies is currently edited by Ivan Turok

More articles in Regional Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().