New YU Report: Universities and ‘Place Promotion’ in West Yorkshire

Report written by James Ransom, YU Associate This discussion paper provides an overview of some of the key issues shaping the contribution of universities and higher education institutions (HEIs) to the promotion of place, and to attracting inward investment and increased trade into Yorkshire and the Humber, and in particular West Yorkshire. It should be …

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Why we need more inward investment to meet our R&D targets

James Ransom, YU Associate

The contribution of business is vital if the UK is to meet its target of R&D investment reaching 2.4 percent of GDP by 2027. International comparisons suggest that this is an ambitious target, that will be difficult to meet: achieving R&D funding goals is the exception rather than the norm. Adão Carvalho assessed how effective R&D intensity policies were across 45 countries, and found that 84 percent missed their targets. For 17 percent of countries, R&D intensity actually decreased over the period of the target.

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What central banks and universities have in common

James Ransom, YU Associate

Last month Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, gave a speech at the University of Sheffield asking if all economics, like politics, is ultimately local. The speech attracted attention for its discussion of whether we can capture and model detailed data on the economy at a far more local level. But there are two other points in the speech worth exploring further.

The first is recognition that higher education, alongside financial services and the creative industries, are sectors that ‘exhibit the highest economic complexity and thus potentially generate the highest value-added’. Economic complexity means the amount of embedded knowledge.

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