Productivity in the West Midlands

The report is written by Melisa Wickham and is in collaboration with the West Midlands Combined Authority.

This report focuses on bringing together readily available ONS data to better understand the labour productivity gap in the West Midlands.

This report focuses on labour productivity – which measures how much output is produced per unit of labour input. There are varying measures of labour input, determined by data availability. Ideally, the measure should reflect what goes into the production process – it should be based on actual hours worked and quality-adjusted (for skills, education, experience levels etc.). Readily available estimates are often not produced to this ideal. The labour productivity data used herein are not quality adjusted and use a mix of hours and more simple measures of per worker or per filled job. In reality, using hours or workers as the productivity denominator often makes little difference to the growth in productivity observed or the relative productivity picture across the UK.