Blogs: Regions, Cities & Local Areas

Local economic prospects reflect a place’s assets and institutional settings.  Our economic analysis helps support locally-tailored policy.

Build Back Better: smarter investment decision making

Portland Oregon

“Build back better” has become a mantra of our time. In the US, the Biden administration is trying to secure a multi-trillion-dollar package of infrastructure spending to drive change.

Together Cambridge Econometrics, ECONorthWest and Hodge Economic Consulting have been consid…

Six big economic challenges facing the new Government

Andrew Sentance

Andrew Sentance, Senior Adviser, Cambridge Econometrics considers what challenges lie ahead for the new Conservative administration.So it is over. The General Election results are in and we know we will have a Conservative government led by Boris Johnson.

But what will he do? …

The UK – an imbalanced economy

uk imbalanced economy

In the first of three blogs focusing on imbalance in the UK’s economy our Director, Ben Gardiner, takes a look at spatial imbalance and productivity.

We find that London pulls away from the other UK regions in terms of productivity and that the regional productivity divergen…

The North-South divide: the performance gap

north south divide performance gap

It is nearly four years since the inception of the Northern Powerhouse. Has the performance gap between the Greater South East and the rest of England, the North-South divide, narrowed?

In short, no. Recent newspaper articles refer to the persistence of the gap between the nor…

Does productivity necessarily increase with city size?

In his second guest blogpost Ron Martin, Professor of Economic Geography, University of Cambridge explores whether the productivity of Britain’s northern cities would improve by substantially expanding their size, or seeking to merge them into a single very large city.

The geographical dimension of the productivity problem

By Ron Martin, Professor of Economic Geography, University of Cambridge

In his budget speech (24 November, 2017), the Chancellor of the Exchequer made much of the need to raise national productivity.

Since 2007, and the onset of the financial crisis, productivity growt…