what should urban economic policy do? lessons for london prof. henry overman (lse & serc)
TRANSCRIPT
What should urban economic policy do? Lessons for London
Prof. Henry Overman (LSE & SERC)
Introduction
Introduction
• Conflicting objectives for London– Maximise economic growth– Less financial services– Geographical rebalancing (north-south)– Reduced intra-city inequality
• This seminar: How economists think about urban policy and the lessons for London on (some of) these objectives
Outline
• Drivers of city performance• Relative role of ‘people’ and ‘place’• Implications for wellbeing (QOL)• Policy implications
Understanding cities
Basic idea
• Cities as places of production– Wages and productivity higher in cities
• Cities as places of consumption– More choice in cities (spread fixed costs)
• Costs of cities– Price of scarce resources (land)– Congestion– Other negative externalities (crime, pollution etc)
Drivers of city growthIndustry Group Agglomeration
Average all manufacturing 0.077
Publishing, printing reproduction of media 0.105
Advertising 0.137
Average all services 0.197
Motion picture, video and TV 0.222
Hotels and restaurants 0.224
Finance and insurance 0.251
Public services 0.292
Business and management consultancy 0.298
Transport services 0.325
Manufacture radio, television and communication
0.382
Opportunities and Challenges
• Opportunities depend on changing structure of the economy (feedback?)
• Challenges are on consumption and costs side– Land use planning– Impact of cuts
• Plus issue of uneven performance
Evidence
Empirical implementation: areas
Area disparities are persistent
Difference between raw area disparities and area effects
Distribution of area effects
Max/Min
p90/p10
p75/p25
Raw 67% 26% 11%
Full control
s
16% 7% 4%
People ‘sort’
Area-effects persistent
Real disparities and QOL
QOL/real earnings estimates
Costs (r)
Wage (w)
Willingness to pay/QOL/ or minus-disposable-earnings for place B relative to A
45 degree
B
Reference place A
j j jr w q
j j jq r w
Real disparities and QOL in Britain
Discussions and conclusions
• Who you are much more important than where you live
• Understate costs of high-wage places if ignore sorting of workers
• Controlling for this makes high-wage places look more expensive
• For cities, costs rise 1:1 with earnings
• High-QOL (i.e. expensive) places are predominantly southern and coastal
Neighbourhoods
Sorting more important in cities
• Because people are more mobile within than between cities sorting more important for area disparities within cities
• Robust evidence on mixed communities limited
• Not ruling out the possibility that there may be small neighbourhoods with very bad area effects
Urban and regional policy
Area effects: LEGI
Pre Treatment Emp
Impact of LEGI on Emp 1km rings
Area effects: Commercial buildings (SRB)
Impact SRB buildings
• Comparison groups– Similar EDs– Nearby EDs– Early and later treatments
• Building commercial space (£5bn) in deprived areas has no effect on employment; no indication of job displacement
• Other components SRB may be affecting ER
Area effects: RSA
1988 2000
Impact RSA
• Comparison group– Firms/areas that would have been treated (more
intensively) if map of assisted areas had not changed
• Increases employment in treated firms and treated areas
• But treated firms lower productivity and RSA no effect on productivity
Costs of living: Housing
0
1
2
3
4
5
GERMANY
SWITZE
RLAND
JAPAN
SWEDEN
FINLA
NDUSA
NORWAY
FRANCE
ITALY
CANADA
DENMARK
AUSTRALIA
NEW ZE
ALAND NL
BELGIU
M
IRELAND
SPAIN GB
Annual average real house price growth 1970-2006
House price effects of planning
• If planning system were relaxed in av. LPA:– House prices in av. LPA: -35%
• and developable land were abundant:– House prices in av. LPA: -45%
• and LPA were completely flat:– House prices in av. LPA: -48%
• Underestimates – e.g. ignores effect of planning on size of houses
Costs of doing business: offices
(mean 1995-05 as % mark up of price of
space relative to marginal costs of
construction).
Excludes cost of compliance.
Source: Cheshire & Hilber, EJ, 2008
0
City of London 488 London West End 809 Canary Wharf 327 Manchester 230 Newcastle upon Tyne 97 Croydon 94 Reading 203 Bristol 157 Birmingham 250 Leeds 193 Amsterdam 202 Frankfurt 437 Paris – City 305 Paris – La Défense 167 Stockholm 379 New York (Manhattan) 0-50
Measuring the Regulatory Tax on
Cost of Office Space
Costs of shopping: retail
13.52
13.54
13.56
13.58
13.6
13.62
13.64
13.66
13.68
1966 1969 1972 1975 1978 1981 1984 1987 1990 1993 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008
Sales per unit area controlling for all other factors by year store established
Representative store:
All values at sample mean except… Predicted weekly
sales per sq ft Loss in
productivity
Store built in 2006 – but annual productivity growth since 1986 assumed at estimated rate for 1966-1986
£20.85 (Base)
Store built in 2006 (post introduction of Town Centre First Policy) £17.52 -16.0%
Store with lowest level of regulatory restrictiveness (based on sample) £19.21 (Base)
Average of all stores in sample £18.39 -4.2%
Total Impact on TFP -20.2%
Total impact town centre first plus restrictiveness
Policy effectiveness
Policy impacts
• Very hard to change area effects– Giving money directly to firms (RSA) appears
more effective than indirect area-based interventions (LEGI, SRB)
– Productivity effects transport interventions limited
• Much ‘easier’ for policy to affect costs– Planning big impact on house prices, office
rents, retail productivity
What should London do?
Ask for more powers?
• No evidence that this will help growth
• No evidence that it won’t help growth
• Plenty of theoretical reasons to think it could help on public goods– Experimentation– Fit to local needs
• Ensure London benefits from Local Government Finance Review
Reform land use planning
• National planning framework matters– Localism versus growth– Restrictions on mixed use, brownfield– Town centre first– Size of NHB and Business rate retention– National planning (mixed comms; brownfield)
• Radical– Land auctions– Drop town centre first policy
Olympics legacy
• Shiny building syndrome
• View as public good provision– Space– Sports facilities– Some housing
• Recognise won’t do much for local people in terms of jobs etc
Transport
• Difficult to detect impact on productivity, but does affect employment within areas– Responsive & based on reasonable projections– Congestion charging– Transport objectives first (social deprivation?)
• More radical:– SCRAP HS2– Use £33bn for smaller high impact schemes
within London and other cities (based on reasonable CBA)
Focus spending• Realism needed
– Some areas of London better off than others– Much of that to do with people not place– Very difficult to change (and no money)
• Radical– Focus investment on places that have potential to
create private sector jobs– Build houses/offices in those places (or transport
links)• More radical
– Lobby govt to SCRAP Regional Growth Fund & spend £2bn on ‘best’ projects in terms of return
People versus places
• Area differences mostly driven by sorting• Benefits to people who move, or commute,
to better areas likely to outweigh loses to people not willing/able to do so
• Commuting dampens effects and extent to which mobile people benefit from improvements in other places
• Other policies (e.g. local wage variation) interact with this
Focus on people
• Policy should focus on, and be assessed by, impact on people not places.
• Policy too heavily focused on public expenditure to “turn around” declining places
• While paying too little attention to individuals.• At the individual level, interventions need to
come as early in life as possible (pre/primary school)
• Later in life, policy should focus on encouraging labour market activity and removing barriers to mobility.
Conclusions• Specific cities may offer an effective strategy for
delivering regional growth …• … but this may widen spatial disparities• Whether we should worry about this depends on
impacts on people not places• Talked about some of the ways could achieve
this in practice• Policy should be focused on people not places
(more skills, less shiny buildings)• Not a view shared by constituency based policy
makers!
References• Who you are as/more important then where you live, raw
disparities overstate area effects; area disparities and area effects persistent despite intervention:– http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/textonly/SERC/
publications/download/sercdp0060.pdf• Evidence on ineffectiveness of mixed communities:
– http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/textonly/SERC/publications/download/sercpp002.pdf
• People trade off wages, costs of living and amenities:– http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/textonly/serc/
publications/download/sercdp0065.pdf
References• Evaluations of LEGI, SRB, RSA and new transport
schemes – coming soon– http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/
• Impact of planning on house prices– http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/
pdf/1767142.pdf– http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/textonly/SERC/
publications/download/sercpp004.pdf
References• Impact of planning on office rents
– Hilber and Cheshire, Economic Journal 2008• Impact of planning on retail productivity
– http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/textonly/SERC/publications/download/sercdp0066.pdf
• Evidence on devolving powers and city ‘performance’– http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/textonly/SERC/
publications/download/sercpp005.pdf
Disclaimer
• This work was part of the research programme of the independent UK Spatial Economics Research Centre funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Communities and Local Government, and the Welsh Assembly Government. The support of the funders is acknowledged. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the funders