E-commerce, Competitiveness and Local and Regional Governance in Greater Manchester and Merseyside: A Preliminary Assessment
Abstract
This paper assesses two northern cities' relative attractiveness to firms supplying e-commerce services and the relative significance and impact of supportive local and regional interventions. Contrary to the hype, e-commerce has not as yet fundamentally changed the relative status of these two city-regions and appears to be reinforcing existing power relations, hierarchies and income distribution. Local interventions remain at the formative stage and as yet are not as critical as market criteria such as the price of Internet access and central government policies relating to regulation, data protection, security and tax. Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) have, however, played a pivotal role in both cities in spawning spin-off companies and supplying higher-order skills. Greater efforts have been made to provide appropriate business support services in Greater Manchester. There is scope to develop regional policies with an e-commerce component, given continuing imbalances.
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1.
1. This research was part of a much larger project funded by the ESRC Cities programme which explored the extent to which Liverpool and Manchester's degree of competitiveness and social cohesion have been determined by the nature of urban and regional 'governance' as distinct from market and other factors. The term governance is generally understood as the way in which policy is now determined by a complex set of public, private and voluntary institutions operating collectively and interdependently at local, regional, national and supranational levels (Stoker, 1998). The research entailed exploring how effectively such interests have mobilised indigenous assets in each conurbation and analysing strategically important sectors such as financial services, air and sea transport and emergent activities such as e-commerce.
2.
2. Most statistical data on e-commerce activity at the conurbation level has limitations and should be treated with caution. This is either because it is insufficiently disaggregated sectorally as in the case of Census of Employment, or spatially as is the case with the Regional Benchmarking data. Surveys also suffer from small sample sizes.
3.
3. Objective 1 is a major European funding programme for regenerating those regions of the European Community with serious economic and social problems whose GDP is less than 75 per cent of the EU average.
4.
4. Differences in the patterns of response for each sub-region need to be treated with caution due to the small sample size.
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