Mobility and joblessness
Paul Gregg, Stephen Machin and Alan Manning
The perceived impact of location on economic opportunity has been a constant refrain in discussions of the economic performance of the United Kingdom for as long as anyone can remember and the source of much feeling that the British economy is not as flexible as it should be. In the 1980s the preoccupation was with the so-called "North-South divide," the contrast between the booming southern part of England with its economy based on the service sector and the depressed Northern regions whose economies were struggling to deal with the decimation of the heavy manufacturing on which they had previously depended in the Thatcher recession of the early 1980s. The North-South divide appeared to diminish in the recession of the early 1990s, but there have been concerns in some quarters that it is reemerging in recent years.
1 June 2004
Published in Seeking A Premier Economy: The Economic Effects Of British Economic Reforms, 1980-2000 (2004), Edited by David Card, Richard Blundell and Richard B. Freeman, pp. 371-410, University of Chicago Press
This Chapter is part of the centre's Labour programme.