Local Institutions, Productivity, Sustainability and Inclusivity Trade-offs (LIPSIT) was an ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) funded collaborative project. The project explored the institutional and organisational arrangements at the regional level that lead to the ‘good’ management of policy trade-offs associated with increasing productivity, and made recommendations based on this. These trade-offs are between productivity growth, inclusivity and sustainability. They arise because authorities have limited resources and have to prioritise: policies to maximise productivity may not maximise inclusivity or sustainability, policies to maximise inclusivity may not maximise sustainability and so on.
The recommendations covered:
- Changes to the way national and regional policy makers operate within the current system of institutions and organisations
- Modest changes to that system that policy makers responsible for the design of the system are likely to accept, and
- More radical changes to that system that could be adopted in the future.
If policy makers act on these recommendations this will lead to strengthened institutions and thus to improved regional and local productivity. Ultimately this should lead to an improvement in the UK’s productivity record.
The LIPSIT project was led by Professor Nigel Gilbert from the University of Surrey with Co-Investigators Dr Helen Tilley (Cardiff University), Professor Simon Collinson and Dr Charlotte Hoole (University of Birmingham), Professor Nigel Driffield and Dr Guus Hendriks (University of Warwick), and Charles Seaford (Demos).