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Economic Geography of Great Britain

Everywhere is different. And the scale and scope of the differences between places provides a major challenge to our understanding of how the economy and geography of Great Britain works.

 

Research conducted by Volterra looked at the economic geography of Great Britain. Our study built on previous work conducted for the GLA which examined the economic and social structure of the South East of England using a technique known as fuzzy clustering. This analysis was expanded to cover the whole of Great Britain.

 

Most studies of economic geography pre-define the locations that they want to examine and assume they know that they are comparing like with like. Our report aims to provide an analytical and statistical basis for deciding how places compare with each other.

 

For this analysis we used two datasets to perform two fuzzy clusterings. Both sets of data split Great Britain geographically down into Local Area Districts (LAD). The first data set detailed the employment structure of the LADs, breaking total employment down into 60 industrial sectors. From this data we created an employment fuzzy clustering. The second set of data detailed the physical attributes of the LADs, including land area, employment and population density and the proportion of people who work locally. Using this data we created an area demographic fuzzy clustering.