North West Productivity Forum

England’s North West region has more than seven million people and is made up of five distinct but interconnected sub regions: the two major cities and urban agglomerations that surround Manchester and Liverpool and the more rural regions of Lancashire and Cumbria to the North and Cheshire to the south. If we use Gross Value Added (GVA) as a measure of  regional productivity performance, the North West lags 8% below the UK average (2018 ONS figures). However, there are marked inter-regional differences too with Cheshire East being  the 19th most productive of the UK’s 170 NUTS3 areas and North East Greater Manchester ranking 160th.

The North West of England’s Productivity Challenge: Exploring the issues

Find out more about the historic context, key issues and future research priorities of productivity in the North West of England in our insights paper, which sits alongside an executive summary: a high-level overview highlighting its productivity picture, including a scattergraph showing the disparities on a NUTS3 level in comparison with the UK average, the primary drivers and bottlenecks, a SWOT analysis and a look to the future.

Insights Paper
Executive Summary

Productivity Scorecards

The Institute’s Productivity Lab has developed a scorecard series, based on ITL1 level, to compare productivity performance across UK regions and devolved nations. It comprises five main regional productivity drivers, captured using 17 indicators.

Download the North West Scorecard