The idea of \u2018levelling up\u2019 is usually presented as a drive to tackle the UK\u2019s economic divide between, on the one hand, London and the South East, and, on the other, the cities and towns of the North of England (many comprising the so-called \u2018red wall\u2019 of constituencies that the Conservatives won from Labour in the 2019 general election).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the levelling-up agenda has important implications for the economies of the devolved nations too and chimes with the comments of a former first minister of Scotland who considered London to be the \u2018dark star<\/a>\u2019 of the economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also opens up controversial debates about the boundaries between \u2018reserved\u2019 powers (those controlled by Westminster) and \u2018devolved\u2019 powers (those controlled by Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast). As in England, it also poses questions about what role devolved or local bodies should play in driving economic change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Addressing persistent uneven regional economic growth has been identified as one of the UK government\u2019s central policy objectives.\u00a0This week it launched its Levelling Up White Paper<\/a>, which sets out what this policy agenda means in more detail, and some of the ways in which the government will try to level up across the UK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As others have written, the UK has high levels of regional economic inequality on a range of different inequality metrics<\/a>. Regions, here, are defined by a hierarchical nesting of local areas<\/a> using the International Territorial Level (ITL) classification, with ITL1 regions being the largest (for example, London or Scotland), which nest smaller ITL2 regions within them (for example, Inner London \u2013 East or South Western Scotland) and, in turn within those, smaller ITL3 regions (for example, Hackney and Newham or Glasgow).<\/p>\n\n\n\nRegional inequalities in Scotland<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Figure 1: GVA per head<\/h4>\n\n\n