ONS Response to ‘Are UK Regional Productivity Disparities Really Narrowing?’

Understanding the relative convergence or divergence pathways of regional productivity in the United Kingdom is an important topic for regional economic policy. As such, ONS welcomes that the authors have examined this topic based on our published regional and sub-regional productivity data and appreciate the opportunity to comment on the article. The article notes the apparent shift away from divergence in productivity between UK ITL1 regions towards convergence within the most recent data (particularly for the period 2019-2022). The authors are clearly sceptical of this result and present a number of arguments concerning the data that they see as potentially giving rise for caution on this result. They then conclude that it will be necessary to observe a few more years of data before we are able to draw strong conclusions on the issue. It is worth noting that the methods used by ONS to produce regional and sub-regional productivity data are based on a top-down approach from national accounts data down to regions. As such, revisions to the currently published data for 2019-2022 remain a possibility when the data is updated in future annual Regional and Sub-regional Productivity publications. Perhaps most importantly, those updates will include data for more recent years that will be less impacted by the economic effects of the covid period. As such, we agree with the author’s overall conclusion that it would be wise to wait until we have some further years of data available before reaching a definitive viewpoint on the issue of UK regional productivity convergence and divergence.