Economy
The city region has a diverse economy consisting of around 100,000 businesses, generating around £52 billion a year and is becoming recognised as a national centre for financial and business services. Leeds is at the economic heart, with some 124,000 people engaged in financial services. The city is the UK's second largest financial and legal centre. There is a large conference industry in Harrogate where the UK's third largest integrated conference and exhibition centre, Harrogate International Centre, is located.
Rural areas have diversified with a mixed economy combining a range of employment opportunities alongside agriculture and a strong tourism base. Regardless of this, poor physical connectivity has hampered growth in rural areas. Agriculture has declined and there are pockets of severe deprivation and social exclusion. There are problems of housing affordability and poor access to services.
Although like most of the UK manufacturing has declined, the city region retains role in the UK’s manufacturing base which has emerged from a period of restructuring and moved into producing higher value goods, managing off-shored elements of production and concentrating on research and development activity. The south and west of the region have historically had industrial based economies, although they have been moving away from this in recent decades. Huddersfield, for example, has been developing in the creative industries sector.
Read more about this topic: Leeds City Region
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical terms.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)