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

Manchester is now the most productive large English city outside London. On the latest ONS sub-regional data, GVA per hour worked in the City of Manchester reached £44.77 in 2023 (current prices) — 115 per cent of the £39.02 average across the other nine large UK cities outside London, up from 104 per cent in 2015. The city closed that gap because its own productivity grew faster than its peers’: Manchester’s GVA per hour worked rose 42.0 per cent between 2015 and 2023, against 29.2 per cent for the nine-city average and 28.1 per cent for the UK as a whole (all current-price figures; ONS, 2025a; Sarsfield et al., 2025; authors’ calculations). With the 2026 Makerfield by-election, a probable Labour leadership contest, and the impending succession question in the Greater Manchester mayoralty, the question of whether the city-region’s growth model has worked is now of national consequence.

This paper examines one pillar of what we can call the Manchester Model: the city’s ability to attract and channel foreign direct investment into productive uses. Drawing on Moody’s Orbis Crossborder Investment microdata for 2013–2025, and benchmarked against Birmingham, Leeds and London, we present six findings — on the scale, composition, timing, sectoral mix, business-function profile and investor motives of Manchester’s inward investment — and a closing discussion of its university–industry interface.

• Scale – Manchester captured 659 greenfield projects worth $13.7 billion and 42,853 jobs over 2013–2025, 1.7 times Birmingham and 2.6 times Leeds.
• Composition – Greenfield accounts for 54 per cent of Manchester’s inward investment value, against 22 per cent in Birmingham, 14 per cent in London and 10 per cent in Leeds.
• Sectors – Manchester’s greenfield investment over-indexes in Information and Communication and Professional, Scientific and Technical activities, which are the same sectors driving its measured productivity growth
• Functions – Manchester attracts high-value, business-to-business corporate functions — sales and service delivery, and the highest four-city share of R&D and data-centre projects, rather than consumer retail or regional headquarters. It is a delivery-and-research gateway, not yet a corporate decision hub.
• Universities – Investor motives suggest it is more likely to be the configuration of Manchester’s university–industry interface — the Oxford Road Corridor, University of Manchester Intellectual Property (UMIP), the Bruntwood SciTech partnership — that is visible to foreign investors, than university quality itself, which is broadly distributed across the UK comparators.

Taken together, these patterns describe a recognisable Manchester Model — a configuration that successive independent reviews and commentators have characterised and debated, with different emphases — from devolution and place leadership (Manchester Independent Economic Review, 2009; Greater Manchester Independent Prosperity Review, 2019; Spencer, 2025) to private enterprise and planning liberalism (Parikh, 2026), even as others question how much of the recent productivity gain is real (Centre for Cities, 2025; Swinney, 2025) or whether devolution reliably delivers it (Sweeney, 2026): devolved governance, agglomeration through transport and place, a commercialised university–industry interface, and a demonstrated capacity to attract and channel foreign capital into productive use. The model is producing results that are visible to global capital. The policy question is how to sustain and deepen it in Manchester and, where appropriate, transfer it to other UK cities.

Authors Jun Du, Xiaocan Yuan, Diane Coyle