Policy Scepticism and the Impact of Welsh Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) on their Host Region: Accounting for Regional Budget Constraints

Katerina Lisenkova, Peter McGregor and John Swales ()

No 2010-72, SIRE Discussion Papers from Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE)

Abstract: This paper replicates the analysis of Scottish HEIs in Hermannsson et al (2010b) for the case of Wales in order to provide a self-contained analysis that is readily accessible by those whose primary concern is with the regional impacts of Welsh HEIs. A policy scepticism has emerged that challenges the results of conventional regional HEI impact analyses. This denial of the importance of the expenditure impacts of HEIs appears to be based on a belief in either a binding regional resource constraint or a regional public sector budget constraint. In this paper we provide a systematic critique of this policy scepticism. However, while rejecting the extreme form of policy scepticism, we argue that it is crucial to recognise the importance of the publicsector expenditure constraints that are binding under devolution. We show how conventional impact analyses can be augmented to accommodate regional public sector budget constraints. While our results suggest that conventional impact studies overestimate the expenditure impacts of HEIs, they also demonstrate that the policy scepticism that treats these expenditure effects as irrelevant neglects some key aspects of HEIs, in particular their export intensity.

Keywords: Higher Education Institutions; Input-Output; Wales; Impact study; Multipliers; Devolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10943/201
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:edn:sirdps:201

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SIRE Discussion Papers from Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE) 31 Buccleuch Place, EH8 9JT, Edinburgh. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Research Office ().