Their estimates of real earnings concluded that North West is the ‘wealthiest’ region in England, while only two of the 50 wealthiest places in the country were in the South East. But the great majority come not because they have a grievance – a word rarely in their vocabulary – but because they have an unresolved problem which they see as urgent. East Sussex and the Isle of Wight were the only sub-regional economies with unemployment rates above the national average. Last year and in particular during the first six month of the year the tight labour market has lead to business increasingly relying on ‘labour hoarding’, instead of firing and latter on hiring their labour.

This is not surprising considering the low rates of unemployment and the implications on productivity of high cost of firing and hiring new labour. In line of this working age population is also expected to increase faster than in other parts of the country. Sub-regional disparities in real GVA per head are large within the South East because high productivity is associated with high employment rates in the same sub-regional economies. Those better performing sub-regions tend to have greater share of employment and output coming from the financial and business services sector than those less performing sub-regional economies.

Perhaps even more importantly sub-regional productivity differs significantly within sectors, this is especially true for financial and some high tech business sub-sectors. This is especially true for knowledge-based employment as those sub-regions with greater GVA per head tend to have greater share of knowledge based employment.

Within the South East those sub-regional economies with GVA per head below the national average also tend to have lower share of knowledgebased employment. Be that as it may, there are some seemingly insignificant details that could be possible for plan Tax Depreciation.

The client’s focus, and thus ours, is getting that problem resolved as the next step, rather than looking at some multi-stage process towards redress. On the other hand the western parts of the region have the share of knowledge-based employment above the national and regional average. Another reason why labour productivity differs between sectors and sub-regional economies is due to the amount of capital used in the production.