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This paper explores the local impact of various forms of fiscal and monetary support for UK-based companies in the context of disruption caused by COVID-19 and associated public health restrictions, including support for household incomes (and therefore private consumption) via the 'furlough' scheme, the Covid Corporate Financing Facility and various national and local business support schemes. It shows that the economic crisis associated with the pandemic has been construed to justify interventions that preserve the spatially uneven status quo of the UK's model of economic development, protecting business from harms arising, apparently, from the public's reaction to the pandemic. To some extent, COVID-19 has been treated as a localised phenomenon that the national economy requires protection from. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the implications of applying the city region concept to a medium-sized city and whether such an application of a spatial and governmental policy is appropriate when the central city in question is also not necessarily economically dominant or connected to its wider city-region. This gives a deeper understanding to the process of subnational restructuring of the UK state via the production of city regions which has now been in progress since the 2010 Coalition Government. The primary focus governmentally and in academic literature has been on larger (English) city regions, but here we highlight how this has been applied in distinctive ways in devolved nations of the UK. To this end, we focus upon the case of the Swansea Bay City Region, based in South West Wales, looking through the lens of Welsh devolution and through the concept of the city-region as a scalar narrative for the delivery of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview and synthesis of debates pertaining to the development of city-regions and their applicability to the UK space economy. The purpose is to make links to advance both international academic debates and realpolitik policy knowledge concerns. The paper, firstly, traces the multifarious and at times disconnected academic discussions around the concepts of regionalism, city-regionalism and localism in the UK. Secondly, it considers the contemporary academic debates on the city-region, focusing in particular on those applicable to the current UK policy context. Given that city-regions are increasingly seen as the principal (and often unquestioned) consolidating spatial scale for economic and social development, the paper, thirdly, probes on the silent and missing aspects of the prescribed city-region approach, connecting and contributing in turn to concerns with building inclusive-growth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]