South West Regional Accounts March 2010: What’s new?
Have you ever been interested to know how many are employed by hotels in the South West? Or the GVA of the region’s campsites? Or how the value of motor vehicle repair activity compares to vehicle sales?
The new release of the South West Regional Accounts provides more detail on five important sectors - construction, motor distribution, wholesale, retail and hotel & catering. This detail allows you to explore these sectors in more depth tracking GVA, employment and productivity over time and investigate how prevalent these sectors are in the South West compared to elsewhere.
New for this release
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The underlying input-output model (including the ‘What if’ function) is now based on 2007 data.
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Key economic time-series data such as GVA, full-time equivalent workers and number of businesses is estimated for 111 industries and the South West RDA priority sectors up to 2008. This data is available for the region, 15 sub-regions and the rest of Great Britain.
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As described above, there is new industrial detail for the construction, motor distribution, wholesale distribution and retail and hotel sectors. It is now possible to look at the components of these industries at the regional level and time series data on these are available back to 1998.
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Capital expenditure is now available for more industries.
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New information on overseas student spending has been added.
Updating your Regional Accounts
Your copy of Econ-I should automatically update the next time you open the software. Please note, there is also a new help file, which you can access here. To load the file, unzip the contents of this file and replace within the econ-i program folder (usually c:/program files/econ-i/) accepting any overwrite prompts.
What are the Regional Accounts?
The South West Regional Accounts are a major resource for people who work in economic development and policy-making and who need to understand the structure of the regional economy. The Accounts are an interactive, easy to navigate tool that provides a detailed picture of the economy. Bringing together the best sources of published and unpublished regional data, they ensure consistency between different data sources and they provide a structured framework to explore economic information for the regional and sub-regional level. In them, for example, you will find detailed industry information on value-added, employment and self-employment, working hours, qualification and occupation structure; spending by firms, households and tourists, and where the region’s main export markets lie.
The Regional Accounts are developed by Economic Systems Consultancy & Research supported by the South West RDA. The Accounts are free to use and can be downloaded from http://economy.swo.org.uk/south-west-regional-accounts/.
The Regional Accounts in the Recession
This new release provides key regional indicators up to 2007, such as GVA, Full-time equivalent worker (FTEs) and numbers of businesses. The downturn will change some of these indicators but the SW Regional Accounts gives us the underlying structure of the economy against which the impact of the recession can be assessed. Importantly, few other parts of the United Kingdom have such a tool to analyse their economies.
During these difficult economic times, the information contained within the Accounts is particularly useful to planners, policy and decision-makers. For example, the Regional Accounts help us to assess how vulnerable South West England (SWE) and its sub-regions are to the recession, relative to the National economy. What, for example, is the value of the Banking Industry in SWE; what percentage of the British banking industry, by output or jobs, do we have in the region? How many are employed in the motor industry or the construction industry and therefore, are vulnerable to current events? Which industries will be most favoured or susceptible to weak sterling or to falling household expenditure? If a major manufacturer shuts down, what is the impact on the regional economy and how many other jobs throughout the supply chain might be affected by that closure?
Technical notes
Due to the nature of data used in the Regional Accounts, the estimates are subject to both sampling errors and estimation errors and hence, caution should be applied in interpreting estimates at detailed levels of industrial and/or geographical disaggregation. Broad guidelines on the quality of different elements of the regional accounts database can be found in the help file. With respect to the new occupations and export time series, the data are generally considered 'fair'.
