Quantifying regional inequality.
How do we measure regional inequality and what's it got to do with Brexit?
Today UK in a Changing Europe, a research group hosted by King's College London, are launching the 2021 edition of their Brexit and Beyond report. I wrote one of the sections on regional inequality.
This is a short blog post to link to my sources so that people can check what we've done, improve it, and re-use it for their own purposes.
Regional inequality, how we can measure it, how we should measure it, and why many measurements are wrong and misleading, is something that we've worked on from the first days of ODILeeds. We've always worked in the open on this, as with all of our projects.
Our methods are open on GitHub. Our explanations are detailed across many blog posts. We publish tools visualising regional inequality within countries today, and in the past, all the way back to 1900.
The UK is Western Europe's most regionally unequal large economy. Probably.
Regional inequality within the UK is undoubtedly high, and has been rising. But a statistical correction needed to make the figures comparable with other countries in Europe shows that we are not as bad as we think.
In a surprise to many, North England's economy is unusually regionally equal within Western Europe.
We can get a feel for this by comparing North England with the Netherlands, something we have done often as part of our Northernlands conferences in recent years. With a population equal to the Netherlands, but an economy significantly smaller, North England has almost no regions with economies as strong as prosperous parts of the Netherlands.
North England's unusually low regional inequality is a result not of uniform prosperity, but of nearly uniform economic weakness.
Regional inequality in the past.
Using the fantastic Rosés and Wolf database we have been able in recent months to calculate regional inequality within the UK as far back as 1900. Comparing with today's figures we see that the UK has risen from one of Europe's most regionally equal economies in 1900 to one of the most regionally unequal.
We hope that these tools and this analysis are useful to people and that you enjoyed reading my piece for UK in a Changing Europe. Thanks as always to our sponsors who help us to do things like this, in particular on this project the University of Leeds.
