This study seeks to take stock of where the LEPs are at and where they are heading by analysing their strategies and priorities, organisation and governance, resources, effectiveness and working relations, innovations, lessons learned, and future barriers and challenges.

While it is now accepted that the 2008-09 recession accentuated regional differences in Britain, it is more difficult to identify the role of major cities, especially over a longer time scale. Using previously established methods focussed on employment, this paper assesses the record of nine...

Ethnic inventors play important roles in US innovation systems, especially in high-tech regions like Silicon Valley. Do 'ethnicity-innovation' channels exist elsewhere? This paper investigates, using a new panel of UK patents microdata. In theory, ethnicity might affect positively innovation via...

Employment flexibility is commonly associated to greater labour mobility and thus faster cross-regional adjustments. The literature however offers very little hard evidence on this and quite limited theoretical guidance. This paper examines empirically the relationship between employment...

This study examines how far and in what way 'Our cities are back', as claimed by England's Core Cities Group. It focuses on 1984-2007 employment changes for the eight Core Cities and their city regions: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. City...

We study localization, urbanization, and Jacobs' externality effects on plant survival inSweden (1970-2004). We focus on two questions: (1) do agglomeration externalities changewith the age of plants? (2) using new information about the relatedness among industries,what is the role of...

This paper investigates wage disparities across sub-national labour markets in Britain using a newly available microdata set. The findings show that wage disparity across areas is very persistent over time. While area effects play a role in this wage disparity, most of it is due to individual...

This paper investigates how physical, organisational, institutional, cognitive, social, and ethnic proximities between inventors shape their collaboration decisions. Using a new panel of UK inventors and a novel identification strategy, this paper systematically explores the net effects of all...

This paper provides a survey and critique of how spatial links are taken into account inempirical analysis by applied economists/regional scientists. Spatial spillovers and spatialinterrelationships between economic variables (e.g. unemployment, GDP, etc) are likely to beimportant, especially...

This paper examines the relationship between the level of public infrastructure and the level of productivity using panel data for the Spanish provinces over the period 1984-2004, a period which is particularly relevant due to the substantial changes occurring in the Spanish economy at that...