Comparing productivity performance across UK regions and devolved nations
The Productivity Institute
The Productivity Institute aims to better understand, measure, & enable improvements in productivity across the UK.
Productivity is hard to measure and its drivers are numerous and strongly interrelated. The Productivity Institute’s Productivity Lab has developed a scorecard series to compare productivity performance across UK regions and devolved nations.
These scorecards cover ITL1 regions in the UK - East Midlands, West Midlands, East of England, South East, London, South West, North East, North West, Yorkshire and The Humber in England; and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Each metric includes a median for the UK.
They analyse five regional productivity drivers - business performance; skills and training; policy and institutions; health and wellbeing; and investment and infrastructures. These are captured using 17 indicators and their past performance is analysed in the short and long-term to help develop regional strategic initiatives and objectives.
London remains the most productive part of the country in absolute terms, while Northern Ireland appears as the lowest productivity performer. However, the picture is not clear cut, with most regions having areas that are doing well and some that could be performing better.
How to use the indicators
Presenting the data as scorecards offers a clear way to help English regions and devolved nations assess their relative strength and weaknesses and allow regional stakeholders to understand which policy areas might deserve further investigation to improve performance.
The use of indicators is helpful for regions and nations to assess their relative strength and weaknesses vis-à-vis others and help understand which policy areas might deserve further investigation to improve performance.
How Northern Ireland led the way in developing the series
The idea for the scorecard series came from the Northern Ireland Productivity Forum, led by John Turner and David Jordan . Northern Ireland doesn’t have the same levels of data around productivity as other UK regions, and inspired by a stand-alone Scotland productivity index, they produced their own version in November 2022.
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The dashboard’s popularity led to the expansion of the series by Institute's Productivity Lab.
Visualising the data
In August 2023, each productivity driver was also turned into a Scorecard Map, which provides a snapshot of how each region and devolved nation has fared. The maps offer a clear visualisation of the regional aspects of many of these drivers, such as how Wales, Scotland and the north of England suffer from lower R&D per job.
A free resource
The Productivity Institute is UK-wide research organisation exploring what productivity means for business, for workers and for communities - how it is measured and how it truly contributes to increased living standards and well-being. It is funded by ESRC: Economic and Social Research Council .
You need to simplify the measures if you want individual businesses to understand how they can impact on these figures otherwise it will remain a purely academic macro-economic measure .