The Geographic Distribution of Production Activity in the UK

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.