In a new series of blogs, we introduce our new associates. In this blog, we meet Eleanor Keeble.
What happens when economic immobility hardens into a permanent geography of winners and losers?
That’s at the core of my focus on what happens when workers can’t easily relocate, when people can’t easily change occupations or cross borders — either within a country or between them — and instead get stuck in marginalised places or industries.
I am an economist and statistician. My research sits at the point where regional wage inequality, labour mobility and migration meet and my goal is to give policymakers an evidence base to act on.
There’s a large body of research into why economic opportunity is unevenly distributed. What I look at is narrower: who captures the jobs an economy creates, who gets left behind in places demand has moved away from, and what are the political consequences.
I come at this from two directions. One is from detailed modelling of the UK economy: how industries, occupations and regions are connected, and what happens when one part of that system changes. The other is years spent working with governments and international organisations across Africa, building labour and migration surveys, social protection programmes and trade models.
It would be easy to treat these as separate areas of study. Increasingly, I don’t think they are. Wage inequality in the UK, insecure work, migration, conflict and climate change are all versions of the same underlying phenomena: how the costs and benefits of economic change get distributed between people and places.
City-REDI is a natural home for pulling these threads together. As an Associate, I want to build a research programme around three connected themes.
Spatial inequality and labour mobility in the UK
The first is about spatial inequaity and labour mobility here in the UK. My work with City-REDI began using the Socio-Economic Impact Model for the UK to look at regional wage inequality and labour mobility.
Part of it builds on the “wage curve” — the relationship between local unemployment and wages first identified by Blanchflower and Oswald, and since revisited across countries by economists from David Card to Andrew Oswald’s later collaborators. My own recent paper retests it on twelve years of UK household panel data and finds it still holds: a 10% rise in regional unemployment is associated with roughly a 0.5% fall in wages, even after stripping out national economic cycles, industry effects and differences between individual workers — a result that sits alongside a wider body of UK regional economics, from Krugman’s early work on economic geography to more recent evidence on the country’s stubborn North–South productivity gap.
The more interesting finding is underneath that headline number. Wages don’t just respond to how many people are out of work locally — they respond to how much competition exists within a worker’s own occupation, and to how easily that worker could move into a different one. I find that occupational mobility does most of the adjusting in the UK labour market: people switch jobs and sectors far more readily than they switch regions. Workers get sorted, gradually, into structurally different regional and occupational labour markets — and that sorting is what hardens into a persistent geography of pay.
Migration and local labour markets
The second theme moves from mobility within occupations to mobility across places — from countryside to city, from North to South, and across borders. My interest here isn’t mobility for its own sake, but how it interacts with — and can deepen — existing inequality, and how its effects depend on place.
Migration impacts differently on the North versus the South, and across different industries, occupations, housing markets and public services. Some places rely on migration to keep essential services running; others feel the strain on housing or infrastructure. And in places already living with insecure work and stagnant wages, attitudes to migration are often shaped as much by those deeper pressures as by migration itself.
I want to work on: how internal migration — rural to urban, North to South — reshapes regional labour markets and reinforces the divide between thriving and declining places; how immigration interacts with skill shortages, wages and public services in different types of local economy; and how much of the public concern attributed to migration is really about deeper, pre-existing inequalities in housing, employment and access to services that migration makes newly visible rather than causes.
Global inequality, instability and shared security
My third theme draws directly on my work across Africa on labour markets, migration, social protection and trade, and on a growing body of work — from Paul Collier’s writing on the world’s poorest economies and the case for a more communitarian capitalism, to Branko Milanovic’s mapping of who has gained and lost from globalisation, to Gary Stevenson’s more recent argument that rising wealth concentration is itself a driver of political instability — that treats inequality not just as an economic outcome but as a source of discontent.
Climate change, conflict and inequality don’t sit in separate boxes. Climate change is already reshaping agricultural livelihoods and food security, conflict is destroying local economies and displacing people, and where young people in particular face limited opportunity, trust in institutions is being undermined..
So far, contrary to many western assumptions, most of that displacement is within countries or regions. What I want to understand is how UK and international policy on trade, investment and climate finance can ease or entrench the pressures that drive this displacement.
Bringing it together
What links all three themes is an interest in the gap between aggregate economic success and what that success actually looks like for a particular worker, household or place. I want to combine detailed economic modelling — which is good at revealing connections that aren’t otherwise visible, like how a shock in one industry moves through others, or how events in one country ripple into livelihoods in another — with evidence about how people and institutions actually behave. Models are only as useful as their assumptions are honest.
Over the next year, I plan to push forward the UK regional wage inequality work, start building the migration and spatial-inequality strand, and begin laying the groundwork for a broader agenda on inequality, conflict and climate change in Africa and what it means for migration and global stability. North–South inequality, insecure work, migration pressure and international instability aren’t separate problems for me — they’re different expressions of the same question: how are economic opportunity and risk distributed, between workers, communities, regions and countries? Answering that can provide an important foundation for policies that build more security and opportunity, at home and abroad.
This blog was written by Eleanor Keeble, City-REDI Associate.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.