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This paper examines the role of local industrial embeddedness on economic resilience in UK Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS2) regions. The 2008 financial crisis had a profound effect on the socioeconomic conditions of different places. UK regions had significantly divergent experiences based on their capacity to avoid or overcome the shock. Research has shed light on some potential drivers behind this differential resilience performance such as skills, but others, such as the degree of a production system’s local embeddedness, are largely underexplored. This paper aims at filling this gap. We hypothesise that the combination of positive external economies of complexity and negative lock-in effects lead to an inverted U-shaped relationship between embeddedness and resilience. We use a novel dataset and method for approximating embeddedness and fixed-effects panel regressions for the period 2000–2010 to control for regional heterogeneity. The results support our hypothesis and suggest that embeddedness has a positive effect on resilience up to a point, after which more embeddedness leads to negative resilience effects. The results call for greater attention on the relationships among local industries, particularly with regards to the recent development of local industrial strategies.

This paper explores the nature and scale of inter-regional and inter-urban inequalities in the UK in the context of international comparisons and our aim is to identify the extent to which such inequalities are associated with strong national economic performance. In order to do this, we first discuss the evolution of UK interregional inequalities relative to comparator European economies over more than a century. We then focus specifically on comparisons between the UK and the reunified Germany. These two exercises demonstrate that the experience of the UK has been rather different to other countries. We further explore UK inter-urban inequalities in the light of international evidence and then explain why observations of cities only tell us a partial story about the nature of interregional inequalities, especially in the case of the UK. Finally, we move onto an OECD-wide analysis of the relationships between economic growth and interregional inequality. What we observe is that any such relationships are very weak, and the only real evidence of a positive relationship is in the post-2008 crisis period, a result which points to differentials in regional resilience rather than inequality-led growth. Moreover, once former transition economies are removed from the sample, the relationship disappears, or if anything becomes slightly negative. As such, the international evidence suggests that the UK’s very high spatial inequalities have hampered, rather than facilitated, national economic growth.

This paper demonstrates how the Regional Entrepreneurship and Development Index (REDI) can be used to optimize local entrepreneurial discovery processes, in a manner which can support smart specialization strategies (S3). While S3 industry prioritization is based on the identification of local strengths, regional improvement can be achieved by improving the weakest features of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. REDI based suggestions are place‐based and offer rationale for tailor‐made regional policy interventions. We found that without optimizing the entrepreneurial ecosystem, the industry specialization alone may not be successful because of the inability of the ecosystem to nurture high growth ventures.

This paper explains the background to the notion of the ‘geography of discontent’ in the context of UK interregional inequalities and political shocks. The paper then examines how the geography of discontent has bound conflicting political and economic narratives together in ways, which makes the correcting for these regional imbalances all the more difficult, and results in ambiguity and a lack of clarity regarding the nature and form which Levelling Up processes should take.