The Components of Industrial Change for Merseyside Inner Area: 1966-1975

A substantial body of research is now to hand to show that there has been a significant 'drift' of manufacturing industry away from the older conurbations in general and the inner areas of the great cities in particular. Most of the work that has come to light more recently on metropolitan industrial change seems to point to the dominance of some form of 'net shift' process. In this, the outer areas benefit both from their own growth momentum and from their propensity to attract more mobile industry. While, for the inner areas by contrast, the absence of growth momentum produces a differential shift in relative and often absolute growth rates. In the paper, Merseyside, in many ways a special and extreme case, is subjected to components of change analysis for the period 1966-75. This indicates that although the physical closure of factories was the dominant force for employment loss there was also a significant shrinkage in the workforce of surviving plants. Such was the scale of employment losses for the inner area that clear tendencies toward growth in outer suburban areas were neutralised. The paper reviews the implications of the analysis for current government policy for inner areas. While much of this is directed toward incentives for small indigenous firms it shows that the real key to the future prospects for the economic base of inner Merseyside and for its manufacturing job creation potential lies with the fortunes of a small number of companies and with their decisions on the future deployment of corporate resources.