Tim Leunig and Nick Crafts report:
‘Had well-intentioned planners implemented green belts in 1800, then Britain would not have been able to gain the “agglomeration economies” that so benefited the Victorian economy: we would not have become the workshop of the world.’
‘So too today: high-skill cities such as Oxford and Cambridge have the potential to be a centre of high-wage agglomeration cities, just like Liverpool and Manchester a century ago. But unlike Liverpool and Manchester a century ago, their growth is constrained by highly restrictive planning laws.’
That is the press release (.doc), which has a couple of pages of detail. The paper does not seem to be available online yet.
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