Outputs live list

What’s this page?

• A live list of stuff I’ve produced on in my policy fellow role, working with Y-PERN, University of Sheffield Management School and SYMCA.
• The majority of this work is being carried out openly on my github repo, mainly in RegionalEconomicTools and ukcompare. I’m writing about it on my tech and non-tech blogs.
• I’ll add to this same post as new stuff appears.

Outputs:

RegEconTools website. All of this work comes under the broad heading of “Open regional economic data and tools”; this website is where I’m collating as much of this work as I can. Here’s the website repo.

On the RegEconTools website currently:

• Resource: Linked regional GVA and job count data, including more accurate BRES job counts¹.
• Explainer / R guide:: intro examples for using the regional GVA / job count data (data in the link above).
• Explainer / R guide: location quotients and proportion plots for UK regional sectors: processing and mapping (also using the above data).
• Explainer / R guide: analysing regional GVA gaps (using the above data). Breaking down by ITL2, ITL3, core cities and mayoral authorities. (Used, for example, to estimate the GVA productivity gap between South Yorkshire and the UK for the Plan for Good Growth.)
• Explainer / R guide: comparing different GVA productivity measures using Beatty & Fothergill’s range of metrics.

Other outputs:

• South Yorkshire ‘Plan for Good Growth’ sector analysis summary document (PDF) hosted by SYMCA. This highlights some key sector ideas that went into informing the Plan (a small part of a large team’s work, including Metro Dynamics). More detail in the slide decks below. (2024)
• Report on business dynamism in South Yorkshire using ONS data that links geographies across time (the original dataset breaks that link by honouring every local authority boundary change; this finds common boundaries to produce a consistent time series). (2024)
• Linking the Low Carbon Renewable Energy Economy (LCREE) dataset to GVA: exploring implications for sector analysis, jobs investment and which dials might affect green sector growth. Longer version with more detail; shorter summary version. Both word docs. Underlying quarto doc here; code in the regecontools repo.
• Output in support of Local Growth Plan GVA gap analysis (2025), (1) interactive plot: five GVA measures for South Yorkshire expressed as percent of UK average, 2012 to 2022; (2) interactive plot: industry mix ‘if thens’ for South Yorkshire - “if GVA per job were UK average in all sectors, what would SY GVA be?” vs “if industry mix of jobs was same as UK average (holding SY sector GVA the same)…”; (3) interactive plot: Arts Council spend in Core Cities over time, percent of UK average; (4) interactive plot: Completed dwellings per resident for Core Cities over time, per 1000 residents (actual + rank), % of GB average. (Data and code for all these is in the ukcompare repo.)
• Companies House open data dashboard for South Yorkshire (work in progress, aiming to make Companies Hhouse open-but-opaque data much more easy to access).
• “Data action for local growth: what do we want to build?” Presentation to ONS subnational conference, Leeds November 2024. All the details and slides in this post.
• Leeds childcare accessibility map, in support of work done by Thomas Haines-Doran for WYCA. See here from ONS for more detail about the accessibility values.

Presentations supporting the SY Plan for Good Growth:

• Slide deck for report to SYMCA on initial sector analysis findings highlighting structural change over time. (September 2023).
• Slide deck for presentation to SYMCA plus local authorities of Barnsely, Doncaster, Rotherham & Sheffield: sector growth, significance, productivity, gva vs jobs.
• Slide deck for SYMCA / Y-PERN joint meeting on growth and skills including SICSOC analysis showing which job skill level / sector combinations are significantly stronger or weaker between places.

Code for these is mostly in the ukcompare repo, including quarto/rmarkdown slides.

Bits and bobs

• Bootstrap estimates of the link between earnings and skills for South Yorkshire using the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings and Census qualification data. Estimate plot here, code here. Used in the South Yorkshire Skills Strategy to give a central estimate: “If 10% of the population in South Yorkshire with Level 3 earned wages equivalent to those at Level 4 or above in South Yorkshire, total earnings could increase by an average of £200m.” (p.14)
• Write-up of first joint Y-PERN / SYMCA policy forum on the Y-PERN blog.
• UPEN showcase: Regional Academic Policy Engagement in England (Y-PERN) - working with South Yorkshire Combined Mayoral Authority. Slide deck here.
• Sheffield R Users’ Group presentation: “Making Economic Data Accessible”. Slide deck here.
• Sheffield Uni Data Stewards Event - presentation on using R to build pipelines for ONS and Companies House data, including links to various maps and plots.
• Job count sunburst interactive showing how SIC codes nest in South Yorkshire. Size of slice is number of jobs. Code here.

Footnotes

1. See the data page for why I think it’s possible to get more accurate job data from BRES directly.