The headline focus of the West Midlands Economic Strategy, Connecting to Success, is closing the gap between the performance of the West Midlands economy and that of the UK as a whole. But how big is that gap? And what are the main things which influence it?
The strategy identifies six key areas where the region underperforms and makes closing the gap in these areas a priority. They are:
- Skills
- Enterprise
- Innovation
- Economic inclusion
- Transport
- Low carbon economy
Over the last year, the Observatory has been working in all of these areas.
We have produced a Scale of the Challenge Annual Summary Report (PDF, 1.4mb) which brings together the main findings of that work.
The report looks at the evidence that we have found around each of the six strands and also identifies the links between them. More details, including a range of research reports, are available on: