In The Technology Trap, one of the more interesting proposals made by author Carl Frey to help buffer the impact of technology on employment are mobility vouchers to help people to move to where jobs are rather than remaining stuck in towns where jobs have long since moved on.

New research looks at the Travel To Work Area (TTWA), which is a statistical tool used by UK Government agencies and local authorities to indicate an area where the population would generally commute to a larger town, city or conurbation for the purposes of employment.  The analysis shows a clear north-south divide within the UK, with cities such as Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol scoring much higher than Newcastle, Liverpool and Glasgow.

The researchers argue that overcoming this discrepancy can be done in large part due to commuting, as just as an unemployed miner from South Wales could move to Cardiff for work, if transport links are good, they could also commute there for work.  The research counters the notion made famous by Norman Tebbit that the disparities exist because the decline of manufacturing industries across Britain coincided with an immobile labor force.

Responses to change

Whilst the authors are at pains to point out that the responses are not immediate, they do nonetheless identify clear population responses to changes in economic opportunity.  Indeed, they find that local shocks are often followed by large inflows of commuters from elsewhere, with this change in commuting patterns often sufficient to eliminate the impact of that local shock within a couple of decades.

The success of these responses are by no means consistent however, as areas experiencing weak employment growth in the 70s and 80s still appear to do so today.  It creates a kind of race between jobs and population, as the changes in population struggles to keep up with the rate of job losses locally.  As such, despite population movement, the employment rate in the area remains low.

What’s more, the challenges faced by one town are likely to be replicated by neighboring towns, which when the cost of commuting is factored in can make escaping this ‘dead zone’ difficult.  Indeed, the data suggests that people are more likely to move house within these areas than they are to commute longer distances in the search for work.

So while workers do appear to attempt to mitigate local job losses by both migration and new commuting patterns, the effectiveness of these responses can be limited.  Given this context, the authors believe that if policy makers could reduce the cost of commuting by 10%, it would change employment disparities between regions by just 4%.  If they encouraged migratory responses by a similar percentage however, they believe it would reduce those disparities by up to 24%.

It perhaps goes without saying that a 10% increase in mobility is quite hard to achieve, but the findings should be read to support a greater investment in transport infrastructure to allow people the potential of a longer commute.  With suggestions that the High Speed 2 rail link might be in jeopardy and the High Speed 3 link between northern towns has long since been scrapped, it’s a message that doesn’t appear to be getting through.