Chapter 8: UK Regional Economic Governance: Corporate Insights into Possible Reform Options

This chapter uses insights from the broad literature of corporate organization and governance, including the roles of mergers and acquisitions, in order to cast a light on the current debates regarding the UK interregional economic systems and its relationship with the central–sub-central economic governance of the UK. These lines of organizational thinking, and especially those which focus on how the logic and behavior of the organizational fits with economic and technological environment in which the organization operates, are very useful in providing a methodological framing for discussing the priorities and challenges associated with reforming the UK central–sub-central governance system. In the UK, the governance system has become ever more mismatched and detached from the regional economic realities, and this chapter therefore uses the organizational logic associated with large multi-plant and multi-national firms in order to consider how to rectify this mismatch. Following this logic, the chapter demonstrates that while devolved decision-making is broadly desirable, the specific financial and fiscal details of devolved system are crucial in terms of determining whether the reformed system is likely to be effective, and that many of these details have barely, if at all, yet been sufficiently articulated.