No doubt GDP figures for Edinburgh are good news
Potentially good news this week was that Edinburgh’s GDP per head has surpassed that of London for the first time. Even with a background in statistics and economics I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant but put simply it is a measure of the value of goods and services produced in an area divided by its population.
I hadn’t realised this was old news as these figures are produced every December and the most recent figures are for 2023. In terms of GDP alone Edinburgh is sixth behind London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool. It is no surprise that London’s GDP is 5.6 times that of its nearest rival Manchester and almost 17 times that of Edinburgh.
Looking down the table it is places in the south of England such as Milton Keynes, Bristol, Brighton and Southampton that feature higher in the table that allows for population rather than in the straightforward GDP table. Belfast comes fourth in the GDP per head table just ahead of Glasgow but behind Milton Keynes while only 11th in the GDP table.
Don’t get me wrong this is good news for Edinburgh and shows how well the city bounced back after the pandemic compared to some other places, but it has to be put in perspective. Certainly when a retailer is looking at an area to open this GDP per head is a consideration, but it has to be remembered this is an average and very few retailers are looking to appeal to everybody.
Population size also matters of course and sometimes that is the downfall of some of the cities in that though they have a healthy GDP it does not feature so highly in the table because it also has a large population. Certainly if a retailer had shops in London and Edinburgh it wouldn’t be looking to open next in Milton Keynes, which is third in the table, but somewhere like Manchester, Birmingham or Leeds.
From Edinburgh’s viewpoint it is good news that the city outperforms Glasgow in that if a major retailer is looking to open in Scotland it will often only be looking initially to open in one of the cities and of course maybe the best example of this is when Harvey Nichols were persuaded to open in Edinburgh when their initial thoughts were to open in Glasgow.
Given all this it does surprise me that Princes Street is still struggling to attract major retailers and River Island is indeed the latest to announce it is closing. But it is not all doom and gloom and other brands such as Topman are about to be back on the high street initially through wholesale partnerships, but they have not ruled out standalone stores in the future.
The other factor that plays a large part these days in high street retail is the number of visitors – as while locals have abandoned the high street to shop online visitors to a city are often looking to go shopping on the high street. While London again may have many more visitors its size can be a disadvantage and Edinburgh, which attracts almost five million visitors a year, is a far easier and more pleasant city to navigate. The facts may have been over-egged slightly but there is no doubting the figures for Edinburgh are good news.