Dealing with the Missing Geography of the Foundational Economy. Local Jobs Distribution and Evolution in France and Great Britain in the Late 2000s

Résumé En

The foundational economy (FE) stands as a novel approach to reframe regional development. Part of the debate relates to its capacity to offer a stable economic basis for structurally weak regions and cities, referred to as “left-behind places”. However, chronological quantitative studies remain scarce, especially at infra-regional scales. Whether FE can act as a development lever for different types of places is still unclear.This paper proposes an inter-temporal study of foundational and non-foundational job evolution in travel-to-work areas (TTWAs) in France (2008-2019) and Great Britain (2015-2019). The analysis breaks down the FE into six economic sectors, enabling a better understanding of their geographical distribution and evolution over time. It establishes comparisons of job evolution across TTWAs demographic sizes.Preliminary findings demonstrate that the sole term of FE encompasses a kaleidoscopic reality: its sectoral composition varies greatly, either at national or local scale. In the last few years, FE sectors have expanded in many of the smallest French TTWAs, even though the rest of the economy was retrenching. But the growth of FE is not confined to the smallest places. More than half of the foundational jobs were created in the few-largest TTWAs. In Great Britain, the situation is distinct still. Ongoing data analysis shows that the demographic size may be less decisive while the geographical dimension may be of some relevance. By combining demographic and geographic insights, the paper examines FE capacity to build a level playing field in two economies displaying otherwise contrasted regional imbalance.