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Socio-Economic Impact Model for the UK: SEIM-UK

Interregional inequalities in the UK are amongst the greatest in the industrialised world, and over more than three decades UK government policy has proved to be very ineffective at addressing these inequalities.

Background

There have been various iterations of government policy in recent years aimed at devolving some power and decision-making ability away from central government towards sub-national actors. As such there has been increasing interest in gathering high-quality, detailed evidence concerning the functioning of regional economies.

The SEIM-UK allows for much more detailed, sector and place-sensitive economic analyses to be undertaken than has been previously available, which better serves the evolving needs of the UK national and sub-national policy-making communities.

The SEIM-UK is a multi-region input-output model that is a powerful tool for evaluating changes in the national or regional economy. The SEIM-UK provides a highly detailed picture of the UK economy revealing the inter-relationships between 30 industrial sectors, 41 UK regions (NUTS-2 classification), foreign trade flows and an increasing array of household characteristics at the NUTS-1 level.

Funder/client: Internal project

Timescale: Ongoing

Contact

Project Lead: Dr Matthew Lyons (m.lyons@bham.ac.uk)

Project Support: Sarah Jeffery, Centre Manager, City-REDI (s.jeffery@bham.ac.uk)

Our Objectives

The main objective of the project is the construction of an impact assessment model, based on a multi-regional input-output (IO) framework for the UK. The multi-regional model will cover 37 regions of the UK (NUTS-2 classification) and it will include foreign trade flows with other countries, as well as different households’ profiles by socio-economic characteristics (age, income, etc.). The applications of the model focus on three main different features: (1) globalisation, technological and structural change in the labour market; (2) household heterogeneity and socio-demographic change; and (3) the evolution of trade patterns and value added chains.

  1. Globalization comprises different phenomena like trade openness, outsourcing and migration. These developments drive - together with biased technological change - the changes in the structure of employment. Technically, employment demand is modelled in the framework of occupations by industry, allowing for substitution with other factors, as well as for different sources of technical change that determines employment by occupation. Different hypotheses, polarization in the occupation/skill structure and labour participation are analysed by the model.
  2. Heterogeneous household groups represent the household sector. Private consumption is therefore not only a function of prices and income but of household composition by socio-demographic variables. Phenomena like migration and ageing not only affect the aforementioned employment structures but also consumption demand and thereby the long-run structural change in a region.
  3. Substitutions in trade, both at the level of one region (between domestic and imported products) as well as between products of different origin will be analysed.

Research team

  • Dr Matthew Lyons, Research Fellow, City-REDI Institute, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham

  • Dr Huanjia Ma, Research Fellow, City-REDI Institute, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham

  • Professor Geoffrey Hewings, Emeritus Director of REAL; Emeritus Professor of Geography & Regional Science, Economics, and Urban & Regional Planning, University of Illinois

  • Professor Kurt Kratena, Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) and Director of Centre of Economic Scenario Analysis and Research (CESAR)

Our Outputs

Reports

Policy Briefings

Project Blogs

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