European Regional Science Association
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European Regional Science Association
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The abstract for paper number 363:
Michael Anyadike-Danes, Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre, Belfast, United Kingdom
The Shape of the Business Landscape: The Spatial Distribution of Businesses across the UK and its Implications for Policy
The stimulation of enterprise has become an ever more central concern of policy – especially of the policies aimed at reducing disparities in performance between regions. Indeed, this has become a principal focus of the UK government’s regional policy. Part of the case for looking at enterprise policy regionally has been the rapid growth of the study of agglomeration economies and their role in regional development. In the UK case the policy and the studies are tied together through the enthusiasm for “clusters”.
Somewhat surprisingly, though, given this background, relatively little seems to have been written about the spatial distribution of the stock of businesses in the UK (or elsewhere in Europe for that matter). Indeed if the focus is on the stock of businesses, rather than regional differences inbirth and death rates, it is difficult to find any published analysis. Of course this may reflect a consensus amongst those studying the enterprise “problem” that data on the business stock can tell us nothing useful (being too far removed from the phenomenon of interest – “entrepreneurship”). But, as practical matter, these numbers are used to underpin the performance indicators which, in turn, are used to judge whether policies have been successful.
Here we use data on the UK’s 434 local government areas (LGAs), more formally NUTS 4 regions, to look at two questions,
How is the stock of businesses distributed across the UK’s LGAs?; How important is spatial autocorrelation?; What contribution is made by population density and LGA area to the distribution of the stock of businesses?
The ultimate purpose here is to shed some light on the extent to which the benchmarks for enterprise policy performance indicators might need to be adjusted for differences in local circumstances.
Unfortunately full paper has not been submitted.