Economy
The Liverpool City Region is strongly established as an important driving force in the economy of Northern England and as a strategic sea and air gateway to the European Union. It connects to North America, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Europe and beyond; serving international, national and regional markets, investors and visitors. Liverpool is the UK’s fastest growing economy outside London, one of the UK’s top three biomedical centres, and has the UK's second largest wealth management industry.
The region contains some 49,000 local businesses providing 540,000 jobs, generating GVA of £19bn-£22bn, and its economy is worth 17% of North West England’s entire total.
The region is largely monocentric with Liverpool as the dominant employment centre, however economic activity is widely spread across the six districts. Broadly speaking Liverpool is the commercial, cultural and transport hub of the region, with Sefton as the base of Seaforth Dock and tourist resort of Southport, Halton as the location for chemical, science, technology, logistics and distribution companies, and Knowsley, St Helens and Wirral providing key manufacturing and logistics for the area. The city of Liverpool itself has a compact Travel to Work Area reflecting its position on the North West Atlantic Seaboard and compactness of the surrounding urban area.
The city region is traditionally seen as a service sector economy, with its so called knowledge economy providing one third of the local employment base and over 40% of its total economic value. According to statistics for 2008, the Life sciences sector accounts for almost 10% of the region’s economy, over 71,000 people are employed in financial and professional services, over 34,000 in manufacturing, and almost 24,000 in the creative and digital industry. The area is strongly connected to global markets, through its ports, airports and by its many multinational companies. World companies such as Barclays Wealth, Jaguar Land Rover, Maersk, Novartis, Santander, Sony and Unilever, all have a major base of operation in the locality.
Liverpool City Region is closely related economically to the wider functional area of Warrington, Cheshire West and Chester, Ellesmere Port, North East Wales and Lancashire.
Over the coming decades, the city region plans to deliver some of the UK’s largest and most ambitious development and infrastructure schemes, representing a development value in excess of £30bn.
- Planned schemes include
- Liverpool Waters
- Wirral Waters
- International Trade Centre
- Commercial District Expansion
- Round 2.5 and Round 3 Irish Sea offshore wind farms
- New Deep Water Port on the Mersey
- Daresbury Science and Innovation Park
- Biomass Power Stations along the River Mersey and Manchester Ship Canal
- Environmental Technology Zone
- Mersey Gateway Bridge
- Expansion of the Mersey Multimodal Gateway (3MG)
- New Royal Liverpool University Hospital and Bio Campus
- Edge Lane Retail Park
- Transformation of North Liverpool
Read more about this topic: Greater Merseyside
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“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)
“Quidquid luce fuit tenebris agit: but also the other way around. What we experience in dreams, so long as we experience it frequently, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as anything we “really” experience: because of it we are richer or poorer, are sensitive to one need more or less, and are eventually guided a little by our dream-habits in broad daylight and even in the most cheerful moments occupying our waking spirit.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)