Publication

Research Paper

Spatial disparities in SMEs productivity in England. Research Paper No 84

Published: 18 February 2020

Improving productivity is critical to increasing economic growth and prosperity in the long-run and a key objective for UK national, regional and local policy. However, a long tail of low productivity businesses and significant spatial variations in productivity characterise the UK economy. This report presents an analysis of the determinants of Small and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME) labour productivity, with a particular focus on how place and productivity interact. The analysis draws on data from the UK Government’s Longitudinal Small Business Survey (LSBS) for the years 2015 to 2017. It employs a multilevel regression analysis to understand determinants in enterprise labour productivity in different localities and regions and effectively account for the contextual environment.

Authors
Associated Themes
  • Business Growth
  • Productivity and performance
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The UK Growth Dashboard 2015, a new study by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) in partnership with Business Growth Service looks at a range of indicators to  shed new light on the health of small businesses and entrepreneurship across the whole of the UK. the report shows that, overall, small businesses have finally regained the ground lost since the Great Recession- with jobs, start up and growth rates returning to pre-crisis levels in 2014 for the first timer since 2008.It paints a much more complex picture of  growth in the ‘grassroots economy’ than the usual caricature of a booming London and trailing provinces – with growth hotspots being found in every nation and region of the UK.

Download the Dashboard data 2015 here: https://www.enterpriseresearch.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Data-for-Dashboard_ERC.xlsx

Published: 13 June 2015