The processes of poverty decentralisation: evidence from the Scottish Longitudinal Study 1991-2011

A growing number of studies have identified that poverty is becoming more decentralised or suburbanised in a range ofcities across developed countries including many in the UK (Minton and Bailey2016; Kavanagh et al 2016;... [ view full abstract ]

A growing number of studies have identified that poverty is becoming more decentralised or suburbanised in a range ofcities across developed countries including many in the UK (Minton and Bailey2016; Kavanagh et al 2016; Hunter 2014). Broadly speaking, the drivers include the factors traditionally associated with gentrification, including industrial or labour market restructuring as well as consumption and demographic shifts.More recently, they have included the recommodification of housing combined with severe cuts in welfare support, at least in the UK case.

The studies above have sought to quantify the extent of decentralisation and, at least in the case of Kavanagh et al, have derived novel measures of uncertainty around these to show that they representmore than chance fluctuations. To date, only Minton and Bailey have sought to identify the processes by which these changes occur, and then only in a limited fashion. One question concerns the extent to which relative decentralisation reflects a combination of absolute reductions in lower income groups in inner urban locations and/or absolute gains in higher income groups in these places. Another issue is whether these absolute changes in turn occur through selective migration or spatially-selective social mobility, or through other processes.

The aim of this paper is to identify the processes driving poverty decentralisation in Glasgow over the period1991-2011, using the novel framework developed by Bailey (2012) extended in Bailey et al (2016). It uses a unique longitudinal dataset, the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), which tracks a 5 per cent sample of the Scottish population, using Census records linked to a range of administrative data.