How Far Do England's Second-Order Cities Emulate London as Human-Capital 'Escalators’?

Abstract

AcknowledgementsData analyses in this paper are based on micro-data from the Office of National Statistics' (ONS) Longitudinal Study (LS), linking England and Wales Census data for a (roughly) 1% sample of the population, accessed securely via the Virtual Microdata Laboratory in ONS. Census output is Crown copyright and is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. The permission of the ONS to use the LS for this study is gratefully acknowledged, as is the substantial help provided by staff of the Centre for Longitudinal Study Information & User Support (CeLSIUS). CeLSIUS is supported by the ESRC Census of Population Programme . This presentation has been cleared by ONS (Clearance Number 30112) but the authors alone are responsible for the interpretation of the data. Analysis has been supported by ESRC/BIS/WAG grants to the Spatial Economic Research Centre, but these sponsors also bear no responsibility for findings reported here. AbstractIn the urban resurgence accompanying the growth of the knowledge economy, second-order cities appear to be losing out to the principal city, especially where the latter is much larger and benefits from substantially greater agglomeration economies. The view that any city can make itself attractive to creative talent seems at odds with the idea of a country having just one 'escalator region' where the rate of career progression is much faster, especially for inmigrants. This paper takes the case of England, with its highly primate city-size distribution, and tests how its second-order cities (in size order, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Bristol, Sheffield, Liverpool, Nottingham and Leicester) compare with London as human-capital escalators. The analysis is based on the ONS Longitudinal Study of linked census records, primarily for 1991-2001, and uses one key indicator of upward social mobility, the transition from White Collar Non-core to White Collar Core. For non-migrants, the transition rates for all the second-order cities are found to fall well short of London's. In only one case -Manchester -is the rate significantly higher than the average for other areas outside the Greater South East (GSE) and its performance is matched by the non-London part of the GSE. Those moving to the second-order cities during the decade experienced much stronger upward social mobility than their non-migrants. This 'migrant premium' was generally similar to that for London, suggesting that it results from people moving only after they have secured a better job. If so, second-order cities cannot rely on the speculative migration of talented people but need suitable jobs ready for them to access.

Urban Escalators and Interregional Elevators: The Difference that Location, Mobility, and Sectoral Specialisation Make to Occupational Progression

“…This might simply have reflected a bias toward the white-collar (rather than blue-collar) working class in that region. In fact, however, the qualitative finding remains when attention is restricted to those starting in a white-collar job, and applies as much in the 1980s as in the 1970s, and even more in the 1990s (Champion et al, 2014). But it still might reflect interregional differences in levels o f educational attainment, etc, which were not controlled for.…”

“…One strand has involved population geographers, interested in the relationship between spatial and social mobility; essentially in terms o f moves across regional and class boundaries, and mostly in a British context (Champion et al, 2014;Fielding, 1992;1993;Findlay et al, 2009;). The other strand has involved spatial economists, interested in dynamic aspects of agglomeration economies within big city labour markets; focusing on geographic variations in rates o f earnings growth for individuals, in both North American and continental European contexts (de la Roca and Puga, 2012;Glaeser and Mare, 2001;Glaeser and Resseger, 2010;Newbold and Brown, 2012).…”

Is London Really the Engine-Room? Migration, Opportunity Hoarding and Regional Social Mobility in the UK

“…Yet in geography, mobility is largely viewed intra-generationally and empirical work has often focused on the relationship between internal rates of migration and class destinations (Fielding 1992;Findlay et al 2009;Champion et al, 2014). Another extensive literature has explored socio-spatial segregation within many major cities, with research on gentrification (Butler 1997), geodemographic classifications (Burrows and Gane 2006), belonging (Benson 2014;Saage et al 2004), gated communities (Atkinson 2004) and ghettoization (Blokland and Savage 2008) , all insisting on the pivotal role of residential differentiation in marking out contemporary class division in Britain.…”

Interregional mobility of talent in Spain: The role of job opportunities and qualities of places during the recent economic crisis

“…If the bias on the traditional dual primacy between Madrid and Barcelona was already detected in favour of the former, for example in terms of global connectivity (Taylor et al, 2011) or the growth of the knowledge and creative economy (Méndez and Sánchez-Moral, 2011), our results suggest the condition of Madrid as the most influential escalator region at country level (if not the only one). Even though this may be interpreted as a reinforcement of the uneven spatial development, the contribution of second-order escalators to a more polycentric knowledge-based development cannot be discarded, as occurred in other countries (Champion et al, 2013).…”

“…Although some of this experience may remain beneficial even when workers relocate, due to its transformation into higher human capital (De la Roca and Puga, 2017), our results suggest that this would also discourage them from moving out of the city too quickly. To go deeper into the question, occupation transition rates have been calculated from noncreative occupations to creative occupations, following Champion et al (2013) methodology. These transition rates express the percentage of workers moving up the occupational hierarchy between 2007 and 2011, with respect to total workers in non-creative occupations in 2007.…”