5: Leading Economic Growth

To what extent do elected mayors, at city or at Combined Authority levels, contribute to local regeneration and economic growth? This is certainly the raison d’etre of many actual and aspiring mayors who emphasise their strategic role in local economic development, a claim which to some degree is borne out by high-profile mayoral infrastructure projects (Fenwick & Johnston, 2020b). It is important to emphasise that this does not only involve the traditional methods of attracting inward investment – which we shall examine in this chapter. Mayoral oversight of economic regeneration may entail oversight of new relationships between public and private sector, a point to which we shall return in the conclusions to this chapter.