There has much recent academic and policy interest in the issue of spatial clustering of economic activity, with most attention paid to the geographic concentration of high-tech industries. This paper describes patterns of geographic and industrial concentration in UK production industries at the 4-digit industry level. Several measures are used, including a new simple and intuitive measure of agglomeration. Conditioning on industrial concentration, many of the most geographically concentrated industries are not high-tech industries. We find that the most agglomerated industries are relatively low-tech and that they have lower entry and exit rates and higher survival rates as well as lower job creation and job destruction rates. Within industries we find that the most concentrated region has, on average, lower entry and exit rates but higher job creation rates and lower job destruction rates.
Authors
Research Associate University of Oxford and Oxford Centre for Business Taxation
Michael joined the IFS in 1982 and he has been a Research Fellow since 1990 and a Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford.
CPP Co-Director, IFS Research Director
Rachel is Research Director and Professor at the University of Manchester. She was made a Dame for services to economic policy and education in 2021.
Helen Simpson
Working Paper details
- DOI
- 10.1920/wp.ifs.1999.9926
- Publisher
- IFS
Suggested citation
M, Devereux and R, Griffith and H, Simpson. (1999). The geographic distribution of production activity in the UK. London: IFS. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/geographic-distribution-production-activity-uk (accessed: 19 May 2024).
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