There is renewed interest in levelling up the regions of the UK. The combination of social and political discontent, and the sluggishness of key UK macroeconomic indicators like productivity growth, has led to increased interest in understanding the regional economies of the UK. In turn, this has led to more investment in economic statistics. Specifically, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) recently started to produce quarterly regional GDP data for the nine English regions and Wales that date back to 2012Q1. This complements existing real GVA data for the regions available from the ONS on an annual basis back to 1998; with the devolved administrations of Scotland and Northern Ireland producing their own quarterly output measures. In this paper we reconcile these two data sources along with UK quarterly output data that date back to 1970. This enables us to produce both more timely real terms estimates of quarterly economic growth in the regions of the UK and a new reconciled historical time-series of quarterly regional real output data from 1970. We explore a number of features of interest of these new data. This includes producing a new quarterly regional productivity series and commenting on the evolution of regional productivity growth in the UK.

We use the underlying data of the IMPLAN Pro 3.0 regional economic simulation model to estimate the current economic contribution of Michigan's local food system and explore the chain of transactions giving rise to consumption of locally sourced goods from producer to processor to consumption. The proposed methodology includes both unprocessed and processed foods in the estimation of the local food system's economic value. The model also provides a replicable and consistent approach to estimating the value of local food systems within regional and state economies.