Has the North—South divide come to an end?—Prospects for regional unemployment

Abstract

The large increase in unemployment in the last two years and the very different patterns of regional unemployment growth as compared to the last recession have brought about renewed interest in the distribution of unemployment. In the last two years the variation in regional unemployment rates has diminished significantly such that by August of this year all regions in Great Britain had an unemployment rate somewhere between the 11.4 per cent in the North and the 7.8 per cent in East Anglia. Ignoring these two outliers, the remaining eight regions in Great Britain all had unemployment rates between 8.9 and 10.8 percent.