Yunze Wang
@yz18
Analyst at Centre for Cities. Industrial policy, economic growth and cool stats. Views my own. 🇺🇦
Wrote about this literally yesterday! Broadly, u can have a productive and competitive manufacturing industry, which may not translate to jobs.
A key thing about manufacturing is that reindustrialisation could be successful but still does not provide a lot of labour demand. Basically, more productive manufacturing industries don’t tend to be very labour-intensive. So atm, productivity and manufacturing job share r negatively correlated.
The outgoing government has actually had one for a year, and it has been (quietly) guiding some key decisions. Half of the sectors involved r actually services, so it has always been puzzling when politicians refer to it as if a plan only for traditional industries.
Most U.S. strategists thinking they can walk a UK election is basically doing this:
I accepted the victory of wildlife and was ready to vote in the second round. … then I learned that the category voting system meant puffin would get locked out, but emperor dragonfly could win on 13%🫠.
London is suffering from a combination of: 1. UK-wide downturn in local services (retail, health, etc.); 2. Financial services being stagnant post-2008; 3. Other knowledge service growing but more slowly; 4. A fall in construction (not replicated in other large cities).
AFAIK, the most recent industry GVA data is 2023, and retail sales would cover more than just supermarkets. But this is a sector that is still recovering *at best*. And this is after several recent interventions.
Our secondary cities r showing signs of recent productivity gain. If sustained, this is quite positive. But the other cause of the narrowing gap is that London has stagnated. To state the obvious, ideally, our strongest regional economy should be growing more productive too.
This is a really good read. Our regional productivity challenge is having economic and political consequences. Though I think the “evening out the gap” narrative is not the best framing. To start with, the “gap” has recently show signs of narrowing, but it comes as a mixed blessing…
This is basically what they did in the two cities seat, if we are looking for another “that doesn’t sound Labour” constituency as a successful example.
Wrote about how exposed households are to higher energy costs (home energy + petrol) and how they vary across places in the ongoing crisis. The North-South difference is quite stark here. A large driver is difference in income, but things like lower housing quality also plays a role.
P.S., if anyone finds the concept of “meat raffles” odd, may I introduce u to the butter princes* at the state fair? *butter sculptures of pageant princesses
My American uni is having an alumni reunion in London. We were founded by by a Scottish American so use Scottish symbols a lot (current mascot a highland cow). Which is why the event is called “Scots in London” in which “Scots” specifically mean “alumni of a small uni an ocean away.”
Once in a while, I think about how my weekly trip to Peckham library is the most reliably pleasant interaction I have with public service/realm.
For example, firms in London seem to scale much larger than firms in large cities. This is evident by the fact that even if they have similar deals in early stages, by exits, firms in London have much larger valuations.
Equity value is more lopsided: London, Oxford and Cambridge have an advantage over large cities elsewhere, even after considering the investable base. But this has more to do with London having larger businesses, and Oxbridge specialising in some capital-intensive sectors (e.g. life sciences).
There is not as much market failure as one would think. The number of equity deals can be broadly predicted by the number of businesses more likely to seek equity finance (a very small share of a place's business base).
There were days when it didn’t feel like this would happen. Can’t wait to be back in the Twin Cities soon.
Oh that was me. This was basically me when I first learned about UK election spending:
Some variations but they are overall not doing badly. See more: www.centreforcities.org/publication/...
So we define Manchester as GM minus Wigan, and Leeds as just Leeds (this is based mostly on travel-to-work patterns). If one looks at Manchester (the city council area) alone, it may be ahead. Still, Leeds has had quite strong growth post-2019 in both GVA and productivity.* *Data is provisional
That knowledge has also been growing at ~5.7% a year since 2019. Thanks in part to that, Leeds is also now the only big city in the North/Midlands to have productivity above the national average. One has to wonder whether this decision would really hurt that momentum.