Regional Growth, Enterprise and Productivity

Projects 1 and 2 have an inter-regional emphasis.  This project, whilst set against regional and national comparators (overseas as well as in the UK), focuses on key regional level systems and assesses the influence of EU, UK, Scottish Executive and 'local' policies in shaping change.  The project considers:

• labour : with declining population and growing international competition for skilled labour, patterns of migration to and from Scotland need to be understood and, arguably, changed; the project examines spatial labour market structures and adjustment within Scotland and assesses the efficacy of human capital policies, including higher and further education, and other factors and policies (such as housing) that could attract migrants to Scotland and reshape the supply of labour skills
• land : high land and house prices in the East of Scotland coexist with vacant and derelict land in the West; the causes and consequences of these imbalances in land and property markets will be examined, including the economic effects of land-use planning, and contribute to the development of an operational model of the Scottish housing and land markets to assess the impacts of these property price responses on inequality, growth and stability and contrast the experience of Scotland with other UK and EU regions
• capital : Scotland has high rates of scientific publication and an emerging reputation for effective knowledge transfer from academia to commerce. However, rates of corporate R and D lie below the low UK rate. This project examines how Scotland operates as an innovation system in comparison with other regions in the UK and Western Europe and will attempt to identify inhibitors to higher innovation rates and whether they are affected by location and accessibility influences.

Additional funding will be sought to calibrate these Scottish focused studies against English regions and EU comparators. This would lead to an understanding of differences in economic development policies, and the roles of development agencies across competitor regions and how economic policy is locally 'grounded' and 'connected'.

Project Co-ordinator: Professor Brian Ashcroft

Project Team: Professor Ivan Turok, Professor Kenneth Gibb, Professor Peter McGregor, and Professor Richard Harris