PHILIP MCCANN VOICES
more like the highly devolved US, Canada and Australia than the UK. This diversity also means that the media narratives in these nations are less centred on the capital.
In addition, these federal political structures mean that the policy machine and the economic actors such as business are not too distant from one another. McCann thinks that a population of perhaps 4-5 million, typical for a German ‘Land’ or a Canadian province, or indeed Scotland, hits a “sweet spot” for scale that England does not have.
“ I do not support extreme
localism, which tends to turn into nimbyism quite quickly While emphasising that he is an economic
geographer, not a politician, McCann does think that there will be future moves towards structures at this scale in the UK. He explains: “This is what we term the meso-scale of organisation. Nearly all successful countries organise at this level.” He adds that he is not in favour of much smaller levels of policymaking. “I do not support extreme localism, which tends to turn into nimbyism quite quickly.” The meso-scale, he notes, is mentioned positively in the 2017 UK green paper on industrial policy. “London and Scotland, the successful parts of the UK, already work at this scale.” Working at this scale might also counteract
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the belief that cities are all-important in regional economics. For McCann, this is another example of US-centric thinking that does not work in the UK. There, he believes, it is generally thought that towns will be left behind economically as cities grow. While this is, he says, “true-ish” in some places including parts of North America, it does not generally apply in the UK. There, small towns and even villages are often highly productive. He explains: “There are struggling towns in the UK, but they are in struggling regions. The narrative that productivity growth benefits are all about cities, and that we have
Insights into productivity
The ESRC announced the establishment of the Productivity Insights Network in January 2018.
The new network will assess the state of productivity research in the UK; improving our understanding of the factors affecting our productivity and informing the development of new strategies and research.
The Productivity Insights Network is led by Professors Philip McCann and Tim Vorley of Sheffield University Management School. They lead a total of nine universities: University of Cambridge, Cardiff University, University of Strathclyde, Durham University, University of Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian University, University of Leeds and University of Essex. n
Email
productivity@sheffield.ac.uk Twitter @ProductivityNW
a ‘cities-versus towns’ divide in the UK, is untrue when you look at the data, and I dislike it strongly. In the UK the big productivity issues are at regional level. Cities outside south and south-east England have been underperforming for 20-30 years by comparison with those in the rest of the UK, EU and OECD. The hope in the past was that big companies in these cities would use their supply chains to drive the productivity of the rest of the city. In the past decade this appears not to have happened and the productivity of many of our big cities has been flat since 2008.” These interregional productivity problems, he says, are likely to get worse with Brexit, partly because of the loss of EU Cohesion funds in lower productivity UK regions. And more importantly, the UK’s less successful regions tend to have businesses which do relatively more trade with the EU, so these same regions are more exposed to Brexit. “The story that metropolitan elite were the main winners from EU membership was exactly wrong,” he points out. New insights
In his new role in Sheffield, McCann is
looking for fresh insights into these issues as co- director (with Professor Tim Vorley) and Principal Investigator of the ESRC’s £1.8-million Productivity Insights Network (PIN) programme, which runs until 2020. He says: “The evidence we have so far lays out a broad map of these issues. This network will produce more evidence and details in terms of specific communities, places and economic sectors.” He points to the scope for linking data on topics such as health, incomes, tax, education, periods in work and out of work, wages during each period of work and access to credit, all at postcode and household level. This would create a far more textured understanding of the problem than we possess today. McCann adds that nations such as New
Zealand and Australia have long-established expert commissions on productivity, which gather and analyse data in this field. The PIN network is linking with them and also to the OECD Spatial Productivity Lab at Trento in Italy. He hopes that it will be possible for the network to “get under the skin of some thorny issues”, and reports that there is already big interest in the calls for funding that the Network has issued. “Lots of people now want to think about this issue,” he says, “including many in business and government. The whole point of the discussion is to engage broad areas of society, so the programme is now at a super-interesting stage.” n
i
Professor Philip McCann is Professor of Urban and Regional Economics at the University of Sheffield Management School. Philip is also the Tagliaferri Research Fellow in the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge 2015-2018 and Honorary Professor of Economic Geography in the Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, 2017-2022.
Email
p.mccann@
sheffield.ac.uk WINTER 2018 SOCIETY NOW 25
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