Measuring wellbeing growth and convergence in multivariate ordered categorical worlds: Has there been any levelling up in the United Kingdom?
Year: 2023
Type: report
Abstract: Perceived inequalities between a Nation's regions can be a catalyst for its deterioration as a cohesive entity (Milanovic 2011).Such imbalances are usually redressed by pursuing so-called "Levelling Up" infrastructure public policies with the intent of fostering growth and development in the disadvantaged regions.When the focus outcome variable has cardinal measure, (such as regional income and employment levels), identifying the disadvantaged regions and examining the effectiveness of such policies, is relatively straightforward.However, when the variables of concern are ordinal in nature, such as Health outcomes or Human Resource levels, identification of disadvantaged areas and measurement of their growth is more problematic.Arbitrary attribution of cardinal scale to such ordered categorical variates is not a solution since equally legitimate alternative scaling schemes often yield very different results and such equivocation impedes analysis (Bond and Lang 2019, Schroder and Yitzhaki 2017).However, this dilemma can be resolved by noting that, in the Cardinal Paradigm, the mean of a variable is the cumulation of chances of higher values over its range (rendering "growth in the mean" a "growth in the chances of higher values" interpretation) and further noting that, in the Ordered Categorical Paradigm, whilst the mean of the variate does not exist without arbitrary cardinalization, its chances of higher outcomes do exist and can be cumulated so that analogous Level and Growth measures can be computed for it.This, and employing the notion of probabilistic distance, motivates development of scale independent level and growth measures for ordinal variables which facilitate unequivocal comparison.These tools will be exemplified in an analysis of regional growth in the United Kingdom over the 2010-2018 period in the light of its "Levelling Up" policy aspirations.The "Levelling Up" phraseology first appeared in the UK's public discourse in 1997 when Tony Blair outlined his aspirations for supporting upward social mobility in a hustings event and Theresa May described Conservatism as "Levelling Up" in a House of Commons debate.Basically, its import is the promotion of catch-up growth in those regions that are deemed to be relatively deprived.The first "official" use of the term was in the 2019 Conservative Party Manifesto written in preparation for that year's General Election, where it was argued that regional economic imbalances needed to be redressed without detriment to the more prosperous areas of the UK (essentially the South), in essence a conditional levelling up.A detailed report "Measuring Up for Levelling Up" was produced in September 2020 whereupon the Treasury Spending Review announced a £4.8 billion "Levelling Up" Fund for interim capital investment in local infrastructure.The 2021 Queen's Speech announced that the Government will "level up opportunities across all parts of the United Kingdom, supporting jobs, businesses and economic growth and addressing the impact of the pandemic on public services".In September 2021 the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government was renamed the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities under Secretary of State Michael Gove and a Levelling Up Task Force was formed in the Cabinet Office.Basically, Levelling Up here refers to the relative improvement of workforce quality, population health and general economic well-being within the relatively deprived areas and for policy evaluation purposes its measurement will rely upon measuring the simultaneous growth of, and convergence in, those aspects of society which are inherently ordinal in nature.
Language: English
Topic: Quality of Life Measurement
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4390043748