Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
with the next TTWA, Reading, that recorded a gain of 16,776 employees. It may be seen
that while some of the bigger cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol,
Nottingham, Liverpool, and Newcastle recorded some of the largest absolute gains,
smaller cities in the greater south east recorded high relative rates of growth. Thus
Reading, Aldershot, Crawley, Cambridge, Milton Keynes, High Wycombe, Oxford and
Luton all posted large increases in ICT employment. This indicates the development of
a distinctive spatial division of labour in the sector that plays a key role in providing the
infrastructures that facilitate and enable the contemporary exchange of knowledge and
information. The dimensions of this spatial division of labour have already been pres-
aged in Figure 23.1's analysis of the regional distribution of knowledge-based businesses
in 2000.
The pace of change and resulting spatial division of labour in the UK were accelerated
in the 1980s by the political economy regime instigated and followed by the Thatcher
governments. This regime brought to an end the post-war Keynesian consensus on
demand management and counter-cyclical investment. This was replaced by an experi-
ment in Friedmanite monetarism, a refusal to provide sectoral pump priming investment
during the recession of the early 1980s, privatisation and the run down of industrial
subsidies. This greatly increased the rate of de-industrialisation during that decade. The
brunt of this was borne by the older industrial cities of the north and also in London
(Martin, 2004).
At the same time an enormous boost was given to the i nancial services sector by the
de-regulation of the City of London, the relaxation of exchange controls and capital
movements, and the lowering of taxes that all helped to fuel a boom in London and the
greater south east (Martin, 2004). Some of the spatial results of this sectoral restructur-
ing can be seen in Figure 23.3. This shows that the average proportion of service sectors
in the English economy had reached 80 per cent of employment by 2000. Of the 17
TTWAs where this proportion was exceeded, only two were located outside the south
of England. Conversely of the 39 TTWAs that fell below the English average, 30 were
located in the north.
These data also raise questions over the relative scale and importance of high-tech
manufacturing in the overall economy. Given that manufacturing as a whole is a
decreasing proportion of economic activity in the English economy, and high-tech is
only a minority of that decreasing proportion, much is expected from a small part of
the total economy. Although the contribution of high-tech manufacturing is crucial in
the information economy, it is not a large enough part of the total economy to drive
economic growth on its own. Nevertheless, the dif usion of high-tech products, such as
ICT, into other sectors of the economy does have signii cant impacts on productivity and
economic growth.
Figure 23.3 also indicates
the distinctive spatial division of labour that is emerging in
the English information-based service economy. It is also the case that the nature and
quality of service employment tend to be dif erent in dif erent cities. In the south east,
for example, and particularly London, the new information and telecommunications
technologies have enabled the city to take advantage of deregulation and highly prof-
itable electronic trading. In a number of northern cities such as Leeds and Liverpool
the new information technology has often facilitated the growth of call centres, the
new sweatshops of the service economy. Thus there is a wide variation in the quality
