The Manchester Regional Economics Centre (MREC) is housed in the Institute for Political and Economic Governance (IPEG) and directed by Professor Michael Artis, who returned from Florence, Italy in November 2005 to initiate the Centre's operations.
The Centre's "study area" is a broad one, embracing both urban economics, regional economics as traditionally understood and the newer "intranational macroeconomics". The Centre's foundation benefits from a number of favourable factors - the remarkable renaissance of Manchester as a city being one of them; others include the recent rewriting of regional policy objectives by the current British government, recent initiatives in the UK radically to improve the available data base for sophisticated study of the economic interaction of the regions; and the development of the EuroArea. In the latter case the ceding of monetary policy sovereignty and the acceptance of substantial restraint on fiscal policy discretion have the effect of making member state interaction approximate that of the interaction of regions within a country. All these factors have been complemented by important innovations in the academic study of regional economic interaction.
Accordingly the development of the Centre to date is proceeding on two tracks: first, the Centre has engaged on a schedule of familiarization with the principal policy institutions and actors in the North West region and especially within Manchester. The Centre is working on commission for the NorthWest Development Agency (NWDA) and is developing a forecasting capacity for the city and the region. It is foreseen that the Centre could offer consultancy services in the region. Alongside the development of a forecasting capacity, an investigation is proceeding into the practicality of developing a "coincident indicator" for the region. The second track consists in working up some research topics to pursue with the aid of funding from external sources (ESRC, Leverhulme etc.) Some work is already under way using US regional (State) data, in conjunction with Professor Hoffmann of the University of Zurich looking at the channels of consumption risk sharing. Further research is envisaged, inter alia, to explore the regional impact of monetary policy, the comparative extent of consumption risk-sharing within the UK and other economies, the regional dimension of productivity improvement and the comparative behaviour of regional business cycles.
The following projects are currently being undertaken by MREC:
- New Economic Geography with firm heterogeneity
- Strengthening the evidence base for the North West
- Consumption risk sharing across regions
- Regional coincident indicators of economic activity
The centre's 'Mission Statement' is available for download in PDF format here.