Geography and economic performance: Exploratory spatial data analysis for Great Britain

This paper uses the techniques of exploratory spatial data analysis to analyse patterns of spatial association for different indicators of economic performance, and in so doing it identifies and describes the spatial structure of economic performance for Great Britain. This approach enables one to identify a number of significant local regimes-clusters of areas in which income per worker differs significantly from the global average - and to investigate whether these come about primarily through spatial association in occupational composition or in productivity. The results show that the contributions of occupational composition and productivity vary significantly across local regimes. The 'winner's circle' of areas in the south and east of England benefits from both above-average levels of productivity and better- than-average occupational composition, while the low-income regime in the north of England suffers particularly from poor occupational composition.