> What stings the most is that if London didn't exist, became independent, or fell into the sea, everyone else would likely benefit very rapidly. Almost all re

> What stings the most is that if London didn't exist, became independent, or fell into the sea, everyone else would likely benefit very rapidly. Almost all regions/cities make below-average contributions to the UK economy. That's because London drags the total way up (IIRC Bristol is the only other that's above-average, but barely). That's obviously driven by a feedback-cycle that encourages investing in London rather than elsewhere. That does not imply that the rest of the UK would "benefit" from losing London; it would be an economic disaster. The problem is that governments are focused on raising the UK's GDP, but that's the sum of each region's GDP and London's contribution is so large that it's equivalent to just maximising London (to optimise a weighted sum, put all the weight on the largest term). Perhaps a solution is to use metrics that combine regions geometrically (multiplying each region's GDP): that encourages investment in poor areas, since they drag down the result (rather than simply contributing less; and in the extreme case, a contribution of zero would wipe-out everything else). We could do the same analysis on other partition too, e.g. multiplying each sector's contribution would make things less dependent on finiancial services.