The UK’s productivity performance is currently seen as ‘poor’ and ‘puzzling’, and in urgent need of treatment. This demand creates difficulties for policymakers concerned with the design of business support and its evaluation.

One of these is that the data typically deployed in research studies of productivity, which provides the current evidence base, is unlikely to be (even potentially) collectable from scheme participants, let alone from a control group.

Moreover almost all available productivity research has virtually nothing to say about microbusinesses, historically the bulk of participants in many support schemes. This project will help bridge these gaps by extending and deepening our recent investigation of the performance of a rather simpler productivity measure — turnover per job. This measure is both readily computed for data which is typically collected from scheme participants and their performance can then be straightforwardly compared to that of other firms by drawing on the large-scale population data available from our Longitudinal Business Structure Database.



Research Showcase. June 2017

The ERC held a Research Showcase on June 20th 2017 at RSA House in London.
The agenda of the day reflected the range of research we are currently undertaking at the Centre. The aim was to share our research insights and ideas with our key stakeholders, and to engage in dialogue with them about these.

During the afternoon session we launched four new projects, with stakeholders feeding their ideas to help us shape future research questions and approaches.The showcase generated lively discussion and we are very grateful for the excellent engagement from our stakeholders, whose insights will shape and strengthen the final project outputs.

CompletionNovember 2016
KeywordsSME, Business Support, Productivity
ThemeBusiness Demography