Productivity Puzzles

Revisiting the UK productivity puzzle: national and regional perspectives

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Episode notes

Is the UK Productivity Puzzle anywhere closer to being solved? Where do we see progress? And what are the pieces of the jigsaw that still need to be found? This episode of Productivity Puzzles, released during National Productivity Week, examines the outlook for productivity growth and the best policies that will lead to better outcomes.

Host Professor Bart van Ark is joined by:

• Ed Balls, Former Secretary of State and Shadow Chancellor; Professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London, a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
• Andy Haldane, CEO of the Royal Society of Arts; Chair of Levelling Up Advisory Council.
• Rachel Wolf, Founding Partner at Public First; Former education and innovation adviser to the Prime Minister.

For more information on the topic:

• Diane Coyle, Bart van Ark, and Jim Pendrill (eds) (2023), The Productivity Agenda, The Productivity Institute.
• Dan Turner, Nyasha Weinberg, Esme Elsden and Ed Balls (2023) Why Hasn’t UK Regional Policy Worked? The views of leading practitioners, M-RCBG Associate Working Paper Series | No. 216.
• Anna Stansbury, Dan Turner & Ed Balls (2023): Tackling the UK’s regional economic inequality: binding constraints and avenues for policy intervention, Contemporary Social Science.
• Andy Haldane (2017), Productivity Puzzles, Speech at the Bank of England.
• Andy Haldane (2018), The UK’s Productivity Problem: Hub No Spokes, Speech at the Bank of England.
• The Productivity Institute (2023), National Productivity Week: a collaborative effort to boost the UK’s productivity.
• Josh Martin and Nicola Pike (2022), National Productivity Year – 60 years on: reflections and lessons, The Productivity Institute.
• Xiaowei Xu (2023), The changing geography of jobs, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
• The Productivity Institute (2022), Levelling Up: insights from The Productivity Institute.

About Productivity Puzzles:

Productivity Puzzles is brought to you by The Productivity Institute, a research body involving nine academic institutions across the UK, eight Regional Productivity Forums throughout the nation, and a national independent Productivity Commission to advise policy makers at all levels of government. It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.