All Research - The Productivity Institute

The Institute’s key research themes are led by ten academic partners spread across the UK.

Our nine Productivity Forums are spread across the UK acting as regional ambassadors for the importance of productivity. The Investment in Productive Places campaign helps places understand how their resources can be used more effectively.

Investment in Places

Businesses are crucial to solving the UK’s productivity problems.

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Framing a place-based investment strategy for Walsall

Walsall’s productivity lags behind the West Midlands and UK averages. But its long-term growth rate outpaces the region and is catching up.

Geography & Place

Public investment and supply

In this paper, we investigate the link between public investment and output in the United Kingdom.

Macroeconomic trends & policy

Is Greater Manchester growing significantly? If so, why? And what can we learn?

This paper investigates the evidence behind the "Manchester Model", examining growth, productivity, investment and governance to identify what is driving the city region's success and what other places can learn from it.

Geography & Place

Rewiring Europe’s Productivity Framework: Aligning Investment, Innovation, and Diffusion

This paper explores why Europe struggles to translate innovation into productivity gains and what policymakers can do to address it.

Macroeconomic trends & policy

Do workers share in the returns to firm-level R&D activity? Evidence from labour markdowns in UK Manufacturing

This study examines whether firms’ R&D investment shapes labour market power by affecting the wedge between workers’ marginal revenue product and wages.

Organisational Capital

Supply Chain Lock-in and the Selective Destruction of EU–UK Trade

Post-Brexit trade only survives where companies were already "locked in" to each other through complex, shared manufacturing processes. But smaller, simpler trade relationships are being systematically destroyed.

Organisational Capital

UK-Wide Growth and Development: Insights from the ‘Manchester Model’

This paper explores how the ‘Manchester model’ of devolved governance and strategic collaboration offers solutions to the UK’s regional inequalities by addressing key barriers to investment, innovation diffusion, and planning.

Geography & Place

The Manchester Model: what foreign inward investment reveals about the UK’s most productive city outside London

Manchester has become the most productive large UK city outside London, showing that its success is driven by strong inward investment, devolution and a well-developed university–industry interface. How could this model inform growth policy elsewhere?

Geography & Place

Ambitious but risk averse: UK manager attitudes and the investment gap

UK managers are not less ambitious than their counterparts, but they are consistently more risk and loss averse, and show evidence of short term thinking.

Organisational Capital

Framing a place-based investment strategy for Newport

Newport has the talent, ambition and sector strengths to thrive, but it needs strong partnership and investment to turn potential into reality.

Geography & Place

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