Publications

Project Report

Published June 2019 (Pioneer Project): Skills mismatches can hamper productivity. This paper develops an alternative methodology for measuring skills mismatches and aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of skills mismatches across Great Britain.

Project Report

Published July 2019 (Pioneer Project): This project aimed to develop a theoretical, empirical and practical understanding of the resources in an outside the workplace that promote sustainable return to work following absence due to mental ill-health.

Project Report

Published July 2019 (Pioneer Project): This project aims to better understand the productivity narrative in manufacturing organisations, looking particularly at the aerospace, automotive, food & drink and pharmaceutical sectors.

Project Report

Published January 2019 (Small Project): Between 2014 and 2016 The UK Commission for Employment and Skills ran a programme aimed at tackling workplace productivity through improvements to skills and workplace practices. This study represents a longer term evaluation of aspects of the programme.

Project Report

Published April 2019 (Small Project): This project investigates the assumption on the positive relationship between pay and productivity that is increasingly called into question in light of wage stagnation.

Project Report

Published January 2019 (Small Project): The lack of agglomeration benefits from size in the UK’s mid-size cities is a well-known puzzle in UK economic development. The study set out to create a new technique for quantifying the role of poor transport in the poor productivity performance of the UK’s mid-size cities.

Project Report

Published January 2019 (Small Project): This study undertakes to analyse variations in business productivity between Northern Powerhouse, Midlands Engine and London and the south-east; urban-rural variations in productivity; determinants of variations in small business productivity.

Project Report

Published January 2019 (Small Project): Considering the link with educational, social and economic outcomes, this piece seeks to reflect on existing understanding, and explore potential relevance of non-cognitive skills to the productivity puzzle.

Project Report

Published April 2019 (Small Project): The rationale for this project was to deepen understanding of talent-intensive, small advanced manufacturers (SAMs) on their own terms; to investigate the challenges, opportunities and the best practices required to unlock the potential for productivity growth through effective talent management.

Project Report

Published October 2019 (Small Project): This project has gathered insights from employers about the potential impact of (and their likely response to) the extension of conditionality to working UC claimants.

Project Report

Small Project (Published: January 2020). Based on the analysis of findings from a study conducted across the North West of the UK, the report provides a clearer picture on the impact of inclusion on regional growth and productivity.

Project Report

Small Project (Published: December 2019). This report provides a broad overview of the link between insecure employment and productivity. It suggests mental health as a pathway to connecting insecure employment and productivity.

Project Report

Published January 2020 (Pioneer Project): This report outlines a new approach to both addressing how housing outcomes impact the productivity behaviours and performance of households and firms and improving the ‘housing’ dimension of regional studies of economic change.

Project Report

Published March/April 2020 (Targeted Small Grant Project): This report reflects on the co-incidence of financial engineering practices and low productivity outcomes in a context of financialization.

Project Report

Published June 2020 (Small Grant Project): The report asks how well
business support in Greater Manchester acts as an ecosystem with the value proposition of enabling tendering capability and, so, procurement of £1 in £3 to small firms.

Project Report

Published July 2020 (Small Project): This report focuses on aspects relating to the interrelation of the effects of urban connectivity, agglomeration, and morphology on efforts seeking to increase urban and regional output through transport interventions in a UK context (National Infrastructure Commission, 2017).

Project Report

Published July 2020 (Responsive Small Project): This project was an exploratory attempt to apply a systems perspective in the context of Northern Ireland productivity policy to generate a map of how policy makers perceive the economic system. Through this process we highlight gaps, biases, and potential opportunities for developing a more refined model of the system to underpin future policy interventions.

• Executive Summary
• Project Report

Project Report

Published July 2020 (Small Project): The aims of this project were to strengthen the link between the HPW processes and the productivity agenda. It will derive and test a framework and methodology for a company to (1) articulate its own take on productivity to align with its business environment, operations and plans, (2) specify appropriate success factors, measures and targets, and (3) propose mechanisms to link these parameters with value added criteria.

• Project Outputs

Project Report

Published August 2020 (Pioneer Interim Project): The relationship between the growth of non-standard contracts – zero hours, temporary and `bogus’ self-employment – and associated workplace practices has received limited attention thus far in the productivity debate. The connections between deregulated labour markets, weak enforcement agencies and the proliferation of non-compliant business practices for productivity has been underexplored.

Project Report

Published August 2020 (Pioneer Report):After the three stages of research, the team found that mental health and wellbeing do indeed have a very significant impact on productivity as this has been consistent across the studies.

Project Report

Published August 2020: (Pioneer Report) The original aim was to co-produce with a variety of stakeholders new insights into whether and why scale-ups in four peripheral areas of the UK (Northern England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland) fail to reach their productivity potential.
Unfortunately, the feedback received from a small pilot study conducted in late February clearly revealed that for most firms in our sample, the strategic priority had quickly shifted from ‘growing’ to ‘surviving’ the impending economic crisis. Thus, the focus of our analysis shifted towards an investigation of the resilience of SMEs with high-growth potential in response to the economic downturn caused by COVID-19.

Project Report

Published October 2020 (Targeted Small Project): The Productivity Insights Network has identified business investment behaviour as a ‘gap’ in our understanding of what is driving, or impeding, productivity growth (see McCann, 2018). This report looks directly at this issue, by considering the circumstances in which large firms elect to invest in enhancing their productive capacity (through investment in skills, equipment, processes, etc.) or instead expanding their production (generally by employing more workers, without improving productivity) – and indeed how these strategies are balanced.

• ISC Summary

Project Report

Published October 2020 (Pioneer Report): The first research output is a working paper entitled “Pay Transparency and Cracks in the Glass Ceiling”, while the second is a policy brief (forthcoming) called “Exposing the Glass Ceiling: Hiring Practices and Gender Equality in the UK Labour Market”.

This works is centred around the objective of understanding how the UK Gender Pay Gap Reporting requirements, introduced in 2017/18, have affected firms’ and employees’ decisions, and measures of gender equality in the labour market.

• Policy Briefing (i)
• Policy Briefing (ii)

Project Report

Published October 2020 (Pioneer Report): The report reveals that a narrow understanding of productivity is contributing to current market inefficiencies in the Cleantech finance sector through information asymmetries (IA) within a Stakeholder Triple Nexus (STN) at the intersection of Cleantech, investors and policymakers

Project Report

Published November 2020 (Pioneer Project): The aims of the research were to:
a) explore spatial patterns in short-hours working and under-employment and identify associated local labour market conditions using relevant national survey data;
b) conduct qualitative research with employer representatives to understand better the drivers of under-employment, employers’ understanding of the problem, and views of its impact on productivity and performance; and
c) draw on these mixed methods analyses, along with engagement with policy and workplace stakeholders, to arrive at policy implications and insights on reducing under-employment and enhancing productivity and skills formation.

Project Report

Published December 2020:Throughout this study, it was clear that understanding ways of overcoming the tension between environmental sustainability and productivity is very important to a lot of mSMEs going forwards. Given that UK-listed companies will soon be required by the UK's Financial
Conduct Authority to produce mandatory climate risk disclosures, it is likely that mSMEs within these supply chains will also need to produce similar disclosures during tendering. Thus, on top of the strong desire that already exists, the compliance and regulatory goals that will emerge from the Financial Conduct Authority will lead to an even greater necessity to help traditional mSMEs juggle these goals. We strongly recommend that more attention is directed to this complex problem to help companies survive and thrive in a low carbon economy.

Project Report

Published December 2020: This report provides a critical review of alternative theories including classical political economy, Marxist political economy, neoclassical economics, and post-Keynesian economics. Clearly, a range of testable models can be derived from these alternative theories. We have not done so in this short report but rather we have utilised a series of empirical exercises to reveal some crucial features of the interaction between the pay and productivity.

Project Report

Published April 2021 (Small Project): An exploratory project using qualitative interviews and a pilot survey to investigate management practices and productivity in service and manufacturing in SMEs in North West England.

Project Report

Published April 2021 (Small Project): The aim of the small research project was to explore the perspectives and experiences about, and the facilitators and barriers to, enhancing health and wellbeing
among a diverse range of SMEs.

Project Report

Published June 2021 (Pioneer Project): This project evaluates whether the location of the firm (relative to the major financial centers) affects its ability to fund their productivity-enhancing activities

Project Report

Published June 2021 (Pioneer Project): This project explores the relation between shareholder distributions, corporate investment, productivity growth and other performance metrics in large listed UK firms.

Please find the interactive index below.

• Interactive Index

Project Report

Published July 2021 (Pioneer Project): Elsewhere, we have argued that scholarship on what has become known as the “productivity puzzle” might benefit from a different approach (Nelles, Vorley, and Brown 2021, Vorley and Nelles 2020). We propose and alternative approach adopting systems thinking to conceptualized and study productivity in order to understand productivity as a multifaceted problem and seek solutions that transcend thematic silos. This report briefly surveys systems thinking generally and in the policy context before outlining the experiments and methodology that we adopted to generate a series of system dynamics maps. These maps, that focus on themes of infrastructure, education and skills, and finance and trade each contain interesting insights and demonstrate the potential of the systems approach. That said, our experience with these methods is probably best described as mixed. Despite these challenges, we argue that there is value in continuing to apply and develop this approach.

Project Report

Published Oct 2021 (Small Project): This report is structured as follows. In the following section we present an overview of an extensive systematic search process which aims to identify and isolate the effect of cashless payments on the consumer. In section 3 we discuss some trending social media opinion and sentiment regarding cashless payments in the UK during the initial lockdown period. In section 4 we discuss evolving hybrid business models including some lessons learned. After this we conclude.

Working Paper

Published December 2020:Spatial patterns of productivity can offer a clue as to which places hold the most promise and face the most peril and understanding these dynamics is critical to crafting place-based approaches and interventions(Arestis, 2020; Tsvetkova et al., 2020) However, we argue that our current methodologies are producing an incomplete picture of the productivity landscape and diluting the value of inter-city and inter-regional comparisons. The spatial boundaries currently in use – such as primary urban areas (PUAs) for urban cores - tend to distort our perception of economic performance of places to the extent that, because of their methodological construction based largely on jurisdictional areas, the analysis based upon them can reach misleading conclusions. A new approach is required.