Fostering Coordination to Bridge the UK's Regional Disparities: A Response to Rachel Reeves's Mais Lecture

This article discusses different policy approaches to achieving one of the key goals that Rachel Reeves set out in her Mais lecture in 2024: bridging regional inequalities in the UK. If it is agreed that the unfettered free market economic model pursued by successive governments in recent decades has led to an intolerable regional concentration of high value-added, innovative production, what alternative policy options are there? The article considers two answers to this question. The first option is to promote innovation through top-down state intervention in key economic sectors. While this approach is becoming increasingly popular among proponents of industrial policy in advanced economies, its potential to reach a wide range of firms and sectors behind the technological frontier is limited. Instead, the article favours a second, comparatively under-explored policy option: facilitating inter-firm and public-private coordination. Three key policy tools are presented for implementing this second approach in the UK context.