National Productivity Week 27th January 2025 | Visit Website

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Turnaround Cities: Lessons learned for the UK

Turnaround Cities: Lessons learned for the UK. Productivity Puzzles Season 2, Episode 7 was released on Thursday, 27 July 2023

How have some troubled cities overseas turned themselves around? What did they invest in and how did they organise themselves? Cities are concentrations of economic activity where businesses tend to locate, not just because many of their customers are there, but also because that’s where most of the skilled workers live and where – more broadly – innovation is happening. Economists call this agglomeration effects. But these benefits do not come automatically. Some cities have successfully reinvented themselves, but others struggled in this transformation, such as Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow. What lessons can be learned for the UK from successful other turnaround cities around the world?

Host Professor Bart van Ark is joined by:

  • Philip McCann, Professor of Urban and Regional Economics at Alliance Manchester Business School
  • Susanne Frick, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Blavatnik School of Government
  • Ian Taylor, Research and Policy Associate, Blavatnik School of Government

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About Productivity Puzzles

Productivity Puzzles is brought to you by The Productivity Institute, a research body involving nine academic institutions across the UK, eight Regional Productivity Forums throughout the nation, and a national independent Productivity Commission to advise policy makers at all levels of government. It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.