History Matters: Path dependence and innovation in British city ...

Figure 7: Smoothed trough to trough growth in UK GDP 1980-2005 (at constant 2003 prices)
2
1.5
1
0.5
Percentage
growth
0
-0.5
-1
-1.5
-2
-2.5
1980 1991
2005
Trough years
Not all the potential sources of path dependent
development or new path creation can be
investigated using existing secondary sources
of data. As a result, in this chapter we focus
on the limited set of data sources that are
available on a reasonably consistent geographic
and definitional basis from the early 1980s. We
would have preferred to have been able to use
longer time series but in most cases these are
just not available in a consistent or electronic
form.
A further difficulty in tracking and interpreting
long-run urban economic change is that many
other factors are also changing at the same
time. There are therefore issues to be dealt
with surrounding the interpretation of what is
significant in the urban context. One such issue
is that cities are where changes in the national
economy are played out. Thus there are
complex interactions between what happens
in individual cities and what happens in the
national economy as a whole. In the analysis of
the long-run development of city economies,
it is also important to expose the underlying
trends rather than focusing on the annual ups
and downs of economic change. One way of
dealing with these problems is to examine the
smoothed changes taking place between the
main trough years of the national economic
cycle. For the practical time frame of this study
these years were 1980, 1991 and 2005. Figure
8 shows the smoothed growth trends between
these key years.
Following Figure 7 we should expect that, if
city economies both compose and reflect the
national economy, the ‘normal’ trajectory of
their economic development between 1980
and 2005 would have followed an upward
trend. Cities and sectors that did not grow
relative to this overall trend could therefore
be considered to have experienced relative
decline while those that grew faster than this
trend could be considered to have experienced
relative growth.
In this chapter, we select 12 contrasting cities
from among all those 63 in Great Britain with
core populations greater than 125,000. We
use their respective Travel-to-Work Areas
(TTWAs) as our main unit of spatial analysis.
In subsequent sections we use what secondary
time series data are available to analyse:
• their development pathways;
• their collective absorptive capacities;
• their local innovation systems; and
• the creation of new pathways.
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