How is the Birkenhead economy performing, and what are the key policy issues facing the city?
This factsheet shows how Birkenhead compares to the five most similar European cities in terms of size and industrial structure. These are: Århus (Denmark), Liège (Belgium), Nancy (France), Strasbourg (France), Tours (France).
Comparing cities in this way helps us to understand more about how well UK cities are competing on an international scale because it groups cities with similar industrial structures, rather than on their resulting economic performance. The factsheet also compares the relative strengths and weaknesses of Birkenhead to its European counterparts on variables such as skills, employment and productivity.
Birkenhead sits in a group of medium sized cities which have a relatively large public sector and particularly small business services sector.
Compared to its group, Birkenhead performs poorly on a number of factors including productivity (GVA per worker), business stock and jobs. However, it is second for patent applications, and ranks at number 62 of 324 cities. It also has a strong employment rate.
This option generates a factsheet of all the available data for one UK city and the five most similar cities based on population size and industrial structure. From here you can explore the rest of the tool to create charts and tables based on the city selection.
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This option will take you to the main data tool and allows you to create bar charts, scatter plots and tables for the full dataset of 330 European cities, or any selection of cities you choose.
Go to the European Cities Data Tool