“The Elusive Quest for balanced regional growth from Barlow to Brexit”
By D Michael Ray, Peter G Hall, & Daniel P O’Donaghue
In Growth and Change 2019 vol. 50.1 pp. 266-284
Britain’s post-Brexit regional strategy to drive “growth across the whole country” (H M Government, 2017 pp. 107-117) is a response to growing post-war regional disparities in economic growth. In the period 1971-2012, London and the South East accounted for a third of Britain’s total employment growth while both the North East and North West of England had declining employment. These growing regional disparities in employment growth occurred despite the implementation in the post-war period of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Geographical Distribution of the Industrial Population (Barlow 1940), aimed at achieving balanced regional growth. The Barlow Report remains the most comprehensive, authoritative and compelling examination of Britain’s economy ever undertaken, and its recommendations were implemented in a burst of legislative activity following World War II. So what went wrong? A main reason cited in the literature is the failures in the implementation of regional policy, and these certainly played a role. However, Professor Sir Peter Hall and I believed that an overlooked key factor was the flawed legacy of the analysis undertaken for the Commission.
My earlier work (Ray 1990) had identified mathematical errors in the formulas in the shift-share analysis introduced in the Royal Commission to measure the role of fast and slow growth industries on regional disparities. How had these errors arisen? Why were they not detected and corrected? To help answer these and other questions my wife and I began an exhaustive search in the British Library and in the National Archives of the submissions, the background reports and the correspondence relating to the Commission. The library staff at Churchill College, Cambridge, also searched through their archives for relevant documents for me. And Sir Peter’s detailed knowledge of the commission provided invaluable guidance. We found that the formulas had been developed not by Professor J H Jones as stated (Barlow 1940 p 248) but by G D A (later Sir Donald) MacDougall. And a second paper by MacDougall had been completely lost sight of with the imperatives of war. But what fascinated us the most was the way in which preconceptions guided analysis and conclusions, the unfortunate consequences of the breakdown in interpersonal relations, and the abrupt and final termination of the work with the outbreak of war. However, an academic paper requires discussion of objective facts, not subjective inferences about their background. We focussed therefore on MacDougall’s two research papers submitted to the Commission. We updated the methodology of the second paper using the concept of allometry. This second analysis draws on the work of Dr. Andre Levesque’s 1986 Carleton University MA thesis.
Had work on the two Barlow papers been properly developed after the war, it would undoubtedly have led to a fuller understanding of the complex nature of regional north-south disparities in Britain and contributed to comprehensive and integrated regional policies.
Our examination of the role of post-war policy suffered a major setback with the sudden and unexpected death of Sir Peter in 2014. Fortunately, Dr Dan O’Donoghue stepped in to help with the writing of this section of the paper.
Our research was intended to lead to a paper on needed directions in regional policy and indeed might have resulted in a submission to the Kerslake Commission (Kerslake 2018). Sir Peter’s death in 2014 has ended those plans, but the publication of this, the last paper he worked on, serves as a memorial to him.
D Michael Ray
Professor Emeritus
References
Barlow M (1940) Report of Royal Commission on Distribution of the Industrial Population (Barlow Report). London: HMSO.
H M Government. (2017). Building our Industrial Strategy: Green Paper, January 2017. London, UK: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Lord Kerslake UK 2070 an independent commission
MacDougall GDA (1987) Don and Mandarin: Memoirs of an Economist. London, UK: John Murray.
Ray, D. M. (1990). Standardising employment growth rates of foreign multinationals and domestic firms in Canada: From shift-share to multifactor partitioning. ILO Multinational enterprises programme. Working Paper No. 62. Geneva.Switzerland: International Labour Organization. https:// www.ilo.org/empent/Publications/WCMS_125667/lang–en/index.htm