National Productivity Week 27th January 2025 | Visit Website

A diverse community of leading experts, policymakers and practitioners

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

Working closely with policymakers

We’re a UK-wide research organisation exploring what productivity means for business

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

The UK’s regional productivity disparities and the “levelling up” agenda

The UK has a profound problem of regional disparities in productivity performance, with second tier cities that underperform compared to expectations based on their size, and deindustrialised towns and urban areas that have failed to find productive new economic roles. The distribution of research and development investment in the UK – especially in the public sector – is also highly skewed to the prosperous Greater South East.
richard jones

At this Vital Topics event, Richard A.L. Jones, Professor of Materials Physics and Innovation Policy, University of Manchester, and a Co Investigator in our Knowledge Capital theme – will discuss the evidence – and the uncertainties – relating to the link between R&D and productivity at a subnational level, and outline the institutional landscape that has led to the UK’s current, highly unbalanced, regional distribution of R&D. He will consider some of the uses and pitfalls of using innovation policy as an instrument of regional economic development.

Date(s)

  • 7 October 2021

Time(s)

  • 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Book here