Clusters and resilience: economic growth in Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire

Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire are two of the most important knowledge economies in the UK. Home to world class research universities and public and private research laboratories as well as a full range of business and professional services to support the development of the knowledge economy, they have been identified as exemplars of high technology local economies by both policy makers and academics (see for example, DTI, 2002; Garnsey and Lawton Smith, 1998). This paper draws on national datasets relating to economic issues such as new firm formation, sectoral composition and gross value added to review the continued development of these centres, before conclusions are drawn on the extent to which the presence of successful clusters (Spencer et al., 2010) influences outcomes for the local economy more generally, and how Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire have performed over the last ten years.