Supporting Comparative Regional Analysis Across the UK : Evaluating the Availability, Comparability and Dissemination of Northern Ireland's Socioeconomic Data

Catalano, Allison and Davidson, Sharada Nia and Connolly, Kevin and Crummey, Ciara (2024) Supporting Comparative Regional Analysis Across the UK : Evaluating the Availability, Comparability and Dissemination of Northern Ireland's Socioeconomic Data. University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

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Abstract

The need for high quality regional and country economic indicators has repeatedly received attention in independent reviews of UK economic statistics (see Allsopp, 2004 and Bean, 2016). Such indicators play a key role in supporting policymaking at the UK level as well as across the devolved nations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Further devolution, the UK’s departure from the European Union (EU) and the UK government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda have again renewed interest in subnational data with a particular emphasis on subnational data gaps and the coherence and comparability of data across the UK. In previous work, we analysed the opportunities, challenges and trade-offs when building a suite of subnational socioeconomic indicators for the UK (see Davidson et al., 2022). In doing so, we sought to respond to elements of the Government Statistical Service’s (GSS’) Subnational Data Strategy (Government Analysis Function, 2021) as well as the Levelling Up White Paper’s Technical Annex on Missions and Metrics (HM Government, 2022b). In this project, we shift our focus to Northern Ireland. The report’s overarching aim is to evaluate gaps in Northern Ireland’s economic data provision with the goal of supporting greater comparability and alignment with data available for the rest of the UK. The report therefore has three contributions. First, we consider key categories of indicator (for example, headline economic indicators, business and labour market indicators, health indicators etc.) and assess the extent to which Northern Ireland has data gaps relative to the rest of the UK.

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https://doi.org/10.17868/strath.00088495
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)