Are UK Regional Productivity Disparities Really Narrowing? An Investigation into Recent Productivity Data Revisions

Recent UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) revaluations of regional productivity data suggest that, after decades of interregional productivity divergence, the UK may once again be returning to an interregional productivity convergence framework. The aim of this article is to examine these data carefully and to identify precisely what the recent ONS data really do tell us about UK regional productivity growth. We argue that the published data yield results that make it difficult to infer anything about regional productivity convergence or divergence.