King’s College London is one of the partner institutions of the £32 million Productivity Institute, headquartered at the Alliance Business School at the University of Manchester, led by Professor Bart van Ark.

The Institute will bring together world-leading experts from a range of disciplines and backgrounds, including King’s academics, and will work directly with policymakers and businesses to better understand, measure, and enable improvements in productivity across the whole of the UK. It will lead to a step-change in the quality and quantity of research available in the UK that will directly inform government policy to improve UK productivity. ESRC is providing £26 million of funding, while the Alliance Manchester Business School-led consortium is providing £6 million.

Productivity is a measure of how well a society transforms work and other resources into products and services that improve people’s lives. Historically, productivity has trended upwards over time, but since 2007 productivity growth in the UK has stagnated. Compared to many of the UK’s peer nations such as France, the USA and Germany, UK productivity is lower.

Understanding and addressing the causes of this is the ultimate aim of ESRC’s investment in productivity research. In addition, this research has become more pressing given the need to support economic recovery in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

King’s is one of eight partners, alongside the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, University of Glasgow, University of Sheffield, University of Cambridge, Queen's University Belfast and Cardiff University.

Funding for the institute, the research programme and additional forthcoming programmes is provided through UK Research and Innovation’s Strategic Priorities Fund. The Productivity Institute and POID will run for five years, starting on 1 September 2020.