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This article offers a discursive analysis of the Conservative green paper for international development, published as part of the closely fought election campaign of 2010 that culminated in a UK coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. The article examines the paper in comparison with the discursive shifts represented by the first Department for International Development (DfID) white paper, published by the outgoing Labour administration in 1997. In contrast with the optimistic and globalist developmentalism that characterised Labour's development discourse, the green paper sounds a more cautious note, using empire to focus on Britain's leadership role in poverty alleviation rather than on global progress, and brings back the full force of developmentalism only at the point where it seeks to legitimate spending on security concerns as a development concern. The article then moves on to examine the green paper's most explicit discursive move, the signalling of a 'post-bureaucratic age'. This move towards increased information provision to promote transparency and accountability is likely to signal greater control by powerful donors in securitised times, albeit with a potential re-scaling of responsibility for poverty alleviation to the poorest local communities. Finally, the article looks briefly at information technologies in relation to the transnational spatiality of civil society, arguing that attention needs to be paid to the more embodied forms of transnational association encouraged by the green paper, and to the selection and impacts of information, which need to be seen in the discursive context of wider Conservative constructions of the 'big society'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discursive analysis of Great Britain's Conservative Party 2011 Green Paper "One World Conservatism: A Conservative agenda for international development." It offers a comparison of the conception of development in that paper with the 1997 Labour Party White Paper which launched the development of the Department for International Development (DFID). The discourse used to describe Britain's role in promoting global development and reducing poverty is examined.

Levelling up and the everyday economy are two crucial concepts for understanding the direction of policy making in the UK, but the relationship between them has not yet been fully explored. Moreover, the UK's industrial and regional policies are woefully underdeveloped. This article suggests how levelling up and the everyday economy concepts could contribute to Labour's emerging industrial and regional policies. It argues that Labour is right to pursue an economic growth agenda, but must make growth work for communities and workers, and the everyday economy can help. The everyday economy can contribute to, and benefit from, local productivity growth, but regions still need companies that export or are at the technological frontier to raise demand, productivity and pay. Labour should work with the government's Levelling Up White Paper, but this was overly focussed on cities and knowledge intensive business services: there is an economic case for including towns and manufacturing too, and they should prioritise connecting places and sectors, building on the diverse strengths which different places can offer, and setting a long‐term direction of travel. Over time, Labour should try to ensure that cities, towns and smaller communities are better connected, better coordinated and more specialised within larger regions. Labour should, therefore, set out an industrial and regional strategy; work up an economic development toolkit; and devolve economic powers to Mayoral Combined Authorities and councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores satisfaction with the political domain of local government performance, using survey data from a contemporary British city as the empirical context. It employs a factor-augmented ordered logit analysis of data emerging from a representative city-wide series of over 1,000 household interviews. Affective reactions to local economic performance and policy effectiveness are constructed in the spirit of the approach used in earlier work by social scientists. The key significant influences that raise or depress satisfaction at this geographical level are presented. Affective reactions to past policy and the economy are both shown to be statistically significant, but with reactions to the economy being negative while those for other policy reactions seemingly positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the UK, City Deals, essentially bespoke packages of funding and decision-making negotiated between national government and local authorities, are increasingly taking centre stage in promoting economic growth. Each City Deal is seen to reflect the needs of individual cities and their surrounding regions, and each has its own distinctive funding and development agenda. Although the City Deal model has been broadly welcomed by national and local political leaders, concerns have been more widely expressed about its operation and effectiveness. This paper outlines the development and characteristics of the City Deals programme and offers a reflective commentary on a number of issues surrounding the programme, namely, accountability and evaluation, the relationship between the local and national states, the role of planning, and sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Arbo and Benneworth (2007) have alerted us, higher education institutions are now expected not only to conduct education and research, but also to play an active role in the development of their economic, social and cultural surroundings. They call this the ‘regional mission’ of HEIs. This paper is concerned with cultural engagement. Research on universities’ cultural engagement in their regions and the impact of that engagement is still in its infancy, partly because there are different understandings of ‘culture’ and of what ‘engagement’ entails. In this paper, qualitative data from the reports of mixed teams of academics and regional administrators involved in a large international project designed to improve universities’ regional engagement are analysed and discussed. The on-going study — PASCAL Universities' Regional Engagement (PURE) — investigates the role of HEIs in their regions across in a variety of fields such as the economy, community development, the environment and others. This article analyses the data from the study to identify the different perspectives universities and regions have of cultural engagement. The aim here is to demonstrate the value of PURE in facilitating the development of mutual understanding both between universities through a common language and between universities and their regions in respect of mutual expectations. For example, particularly difficult to de-construct is universities’ engagement with disadvantaged communities (Doyle, 2007) but Powell's (2009) work suggests that universities might engage more broadly and effectively ‘through better knowledge sharing and co-creation with business and community partners’ to become ‘real drivers of creative change in developing socially inclusive projects’. Others have written about the educational role of universities in developing a ‘lifelong learning culture’ in their region (European Universities’ Charter on Lifelong Learning, 2008). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The paper implements a methodology for assessing the regional impact of investment grants on foreign direct investment (FDI) location, taking data for U.K. regional policy over the period 1985-2005. Using a Generalized Methods of Moments estimator it finds that each £25 million of grant changes the regional location of about six inward FDI projects. On average, projects have 150 jobs and each job diverted costs £27,500 (1995 prices). It also finds that the size of the area designated for grants has a positive location effect. The effect is small in relation to the overall scale of FDI, which may explain the weak grant effect found in recent plant-based location studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge intensive services (KIS) have grown rapidly across Europe in recent years and are often regarded as critical to economic growth and knowledge diffusion. This paper focuses on the factors determining spatial variations in the growth of these services. Combining insights from the regional innovation systems approach and modern growth theory, it is argued that local economic diversity may be beneficial to the growth of KIS. An empirical study of Great Britain over the period 1991–2002 reveals significant regional variations, with rapid growth occurring in a central cluster and major urban areas. The results of an empirical model provide support for the positive impact of diversity on employment growth but no evidence of a positive effect of sector specialisation. From a policy perspective, the analysis suggests that greater attention needs to be devoted to enhancing economic diversity and understanding sector specific effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British society has changed greatly over the past half century. Increasing uncertainty about economic and social developments is becoming a distinctive feature of modern industrialized countries, affecting the life chances and opportunities of young people making the transition from dependent childhood into independent adulthood. Summarizing recent findings from data collected from about 30,000 individuals born 12 years apart, in 1958 and 1970 respectively, this paper examines the role of individual agency in shaping educational and occupational transitions as well as the assumption of family-related roles in times of social change. The data suggest that societal change and the associated increasing uncertainty does not impact on all individuals in the same way, and that there has been an increasing polarization between those who are able to benefit from the economic and social transformations and the ones who are excluded, largely because of their relatively disadvantaged socioeconomic circumstances and lack of access to opportunities in education and employment. It is concluded that human agency processes cannot be studied in isolation from the sociohistorical context in which they are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines patterns of persistence, mobility, convergence and divergence in the shape and evolution of the distribution of GDP per head across Great Britain (GB). Using a distribution dynamics approach, the evidence suggests that there is no pattern of overall convergence and a number of counties are persistently located at the extremes of the distribution. While there is some evidence of a north-south divide, fragmented islands and sub-regions of persistence are located across geographical space. This pattern of persistence and divergence coexists with upwards and downwards intra-distributional mobility, some of which appears to exhibit specific spatial patterns. The evidence is more consistent with approaches emphasising uneven development than theories predicting economic convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the pattern of educational homogamy in Ireland and Britain. Using contemporary data on recent marriages from the early 1970s through to the mid-1990s, we show that these two countries share a broadly similar pattern of educational homogamy, which is quasi-symmetric in character, with no tendency for women to marry up over and above that which can be attributed to the gender difference in educational attainment. In the 1970s, the strength of homogamy was much weaker in Ireland than in Britain. But we discern a clear inter-country difference in how the net strength of homogamy has changed over time. While it has declined in Britain since the 1970s, in Ireland the strength of homogamy has first increased and then levelled off. Our findings are inconsistent with the inverted U-shaped relationship between economic development and homogamy reported by Smits, Ultee and Lammers (1998) - an argument premised on secular change in the criteria of spouse selection. Instead, our results are better understood in terms of Mare's (1991) life course argument that homogamy is inversely related to the time-gap between school departure and first marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on local and regional economic development has focused upon transformations in local governance and institutional capacity. It has been argued that local authorities have ceded power to other actors and institutions involved in economic development and regeneration, and that the success of local and regional economic development is closely related to the strength of ‘institutional capacity’ within an area. In this paper, we examine these claims with reference to the operation of EU Structural Funds in the Humber Sub-region of the UK. Previous research on local governance and institutional capacity has had a limited empirical focus, drawing conclusions from studies of either economically ‘successful’ regions or regions undergoing regulatory and institutional transformation and precluding analysis of the nature and conditions of local governance and institutional capacity in less developed regions. Our case study evidence not only suggests that arguments about the declining influence of the local state are overdrawn, but also indicates a need for more nuanced accounts of the role of institutional capacity in regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the report `White Paper on Regional Development Agencies' published by Great Britain in December 1997 which described the economic performance of the country. Failure of the conventional regional economic policy; Examination on the flaws of the economic policies implemented by the government; Aim of the country to level with its international competitors; Strategies and policies which the government should launch to spur economic development.

The reforms instituted by the Broadcasting Act 1990 led to a period of turbulence and upheaval within broadcasting with results that were at best unintended and, at worst, seriously undermined the ideal of public service broadcasting. A Hayekian economic perspective would suggest that the reforms failed because they did not go far enough in the direction of full `marketization'. The paper develops an alternative perspective, based on an adaptation of systems theory within the context of law and economics. This approach offers a broader methodological foundation for the understanding of `economic law' and a different normative perspective on the broadcasting reforms. It is suggested that the difficulty with these reforms was not their failure to go further in the direction of the market, but rather their lack of clarity in articulating a clear alternative to the market as the basis for the organization of television production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper represents both a critique and a development of recent attempts to assess capital penetration in agricultural production relations. It applies new empirical material from upland Britain in order to provide a wider spatial basis for an assessment of the uneven nature of agrarian development. By incorporating aspects of the social reproduction of farm families into the analysis of subsumption, it exposes the complementary rather than contradictory nature of social reproductive and external capital relations in reproducing different forms of agrarian change. This raises important questions concerning the variable social sustainability of commodity relations in a post-productivist agrarian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past decade, much attention has been paid to the migration-development nexus, both in academia and in the global development community. This has created what we argue in this paper can be characterized as an 'international buzz' around the issue. In this paper, we explore how two donor countries, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have approached the nexus in their policies and practices in recent years. We examine in what ways it has been feasible to work with migration-development links, taking into account various interests and the national political climates regarding development aid and immigration policies. Important themes of the nexus, which are discussed in detail going through the policies, are remittances, engagement with migrant associations, and temporary migration schemes and programmes addressing the so-called 'brain drain' problem. We argue that the two countries represent two different trends among donors: the one does not directly link migration management with migration and development policies, as these are conceived within the national donor agencies; while the other appears to be more focused on providing better migration management through development cooperation. In the conclusion, we argue that the consensus-orientated simplicity of the buzz surrounding migration and development can be said to have had a somewhat restricting effect on the policies, in the sense that it seems to have discouraged conflicting parts of the migration-development nexus from being taken up in the national contexts. Based on our analysis of the two countries' policies, we discuss possible implications for the future, reflecting on the tendency of buzzwords to dip in and out of fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]