The headline focus of the West Midlands Economic Strategy, Connecting to Success, is closing the gap between the performance of the West Midlands economy and that of the UK as a whole. But how big is that gap? And what are the main things which influence it?
The strategy identifies six key areas where the West Midlands underperforms and makes closing the gap in these areas a priority. They are:
- Skills
- Enterprise
- Innovation
- Economic inclusion
- Transport
- Low carbon economy
Since 2008, the Observatory has been working in all six of these areas (although our work on transport was limited and will not be continued).
Annual summary report
The work we've undertaken over 2009/2010 is summarised in our second scale of the challenge annual summary report (pdf, 3.55mb), published 6th July 2010.
The report looks at the evidence we found around each of the five continuing strands and also identifies the links between them. More details, including a range of research reports, are available on our research pages:
The previous annual report (pdf, 1.3mb), published 11th June 2009, is also available.