Examining the numbers behind Andy Burnham’s ‘Manchester Miracle’
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to More or Less. I'm Tim Harford and we are your weekly guide to the numbers all around us. From the sizzling skyscrapers of the world's great cities to the cool depths of the Pacific Ocean. From the infinite mysteries of the Primes as they float in Plato's realm of forms to Manchester. Well, it had to happen. On Monday morning, Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, the new MP for Makerfield, and definitely not the Prime Minister, gave a big speech outlining his vision to transform the UK economy. This speech was given, where else, in Manchester, the city where he was mayor from 2017 until a couple of weeks ago, and that has now given rise to a new addition to the Economic Phrasebook.
What economic agenda is Andy Burnham proposing for Greater Manchester?
This is Manchesterism.
Manchesterism, Burnham told us, can be a model for the rest of the UK in its search for that long-awaited economic growth that has proved so elusive. And to achieve long-term economic growth, as any economist will tell you, you need to increase productivity, the amount of economic output you get for every hour worked.
How does air conditioning contribute to urban heat islands?
And if you look at the economic record of Greater Manchester and Andy Burnham, well, according to the official statistics, something remarkable seems to have happened. Here's Paul Swinney, Chief Economist at the Data City. So if we look at the statistics from the ONS... It tells a story for Manchester, which is very similar to the UK up until around about 2018, 2019 time, which is that productivity is being flat. You know, being very little change in how much people produce for the hours that they put in at work, which is really important because it has an impact on wages ultimately.
What are the surprising facts about whales and carbon capture?
And that's the thing that people care about, how much money is in their pockets. Okay, so disappointing in Manchester and in the UK until 2019 and then? And then, all of a sudden, there was a miracle. where Manchester grows, or Greater Manchester, grows from having productivity growth on average of 0.5% from 2008 to 2019, to then a growth of 3.3% per year on average from 2019 through to 2023. That's a pretty amazing performance on the face of it. 2023 is the most recent date for which we have regional figures, by the way. If you turn these annual figures into cumulative totals, then between 2019 and 2023, productivity grew by about 14% in Greater Manchester.
What mysteries do prime numbers hold according to Werner Herzog?
That's an impressive number. The UK figure for the same period is about 3%. But is it too impressive? When I first thought when I looked at the data, it was like, that can't be real. That is quite an incredible performance if we think about the challenges that the UK has faced as a country since 2008 with this totally flatlining productivity. Something else prompted Paul to raise an eyebrow. If... Productivity was sharply increasing in Manchester. I would expect to see wages also to sharply increase. Have they? They haven't. So productivity rises by 14% in the data, but real wages rise by around about 1%, which is a huge divergence. This presents us with a bit of a dilemma. Either productivity growth did jump up, but few of the benefits were reflected in median wages, or the jump never happened.
So Paul started digging into the data, starting with the economic output part of the equation.
How has productivity changed in Greater Manchester since 2019?
And he found something a bit odd. And so we look at it on a sectoral basis, we can see that legal and accounting, there was something very, very strange going on there, where a very large share of the country's overall growth in legal and accounting was occurring not just in Greater Manchester, but in Trafford local authority in particular, an enormous amount of growth for one local authority. So that sounds like one big firm or cluster of firms. Very potentially, yes. But that could be real. It could be. So I thought, OK, well, I can't get any further with that data. So let's try and look at a different data source. And let's look at jobs, where we can get more fine-grained detail on jobs from a sector perspective, but also from a geography perspective too.
And zooming in on that, what you then see is that this growth in legal and accounting, there was a huge spike in jobs, about 21,000 extra jobs added over this quite short period.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:50
2
What economic agenda is Andy Burnham proposing for Greater Manchester?
0:50–1:17
3
How does air conditioning contribute to urban heat islands?
1:17–1:50
4
What are the surprising facts about whales and carbon capture?
1:50–2:36
5
What mysteries do prime numbers hold according to Werner Herzog?
2:36–3:36
6
How has productivity changed in Greater Manchester since 2019?
3:36–4:42
7
Why are there discrepancies between productivity growth and wage increases?
4:42–5:27
8
What are the limitations of the data used to assess Manchester's economic performance?
5:27–28:27