Welsh Journals

4. ECONOMIC REGENERATION IN INDUSTRIAL SOUTH WALES: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS Jonathan Morris Roger Mansfield INTRODUCTION In the post-war era there has been a rapid transformation of the Welsh economic base from one dominated by coal and metal manufacturing to a far more diversified manufacturing and service based economy. These shifts in economic activity have been both relative and absolute, with a decline in coal and metal manufacture and a rise of consumer based manufacturing sectors such as vehicles, electronic engineering and chemicals, in addition to a large increase in service sector employment. Up until the 1970s this reconstruction had been relatively balanced, in numerical terms at least, with similar numbers employed in the early 1970s as had been in the 1940s. Despite this, spatial and social dislocation had occurred, in that often the new jobs did not act as a straight replacement for the old jobs. Women were increasingly incorporated into the labour market and new jobs did not coincide geographically with the older ones, as the coastal belt gained at the expense of the valley areas. Moreover, economic activity rates remained low and unemployment rates relatively high. While the state controlled industries were losing employment, the Welsh economy was becoming more prone to external control through its reliance on branch plants, particularly those owned by foreign companies. The late 1970s and early 1980s have seen a massive dislocation of the economic structure of industrial south Wales. Central to this dis- location have been the large-scale redundancies in the nationalized steel and coal industries. As Table 4.1 illustrates, the 1970s saw a fairly static employment pattern, with similar numbers employed in 1978 as in the early 1970s; in fact, there was a minor increase in