Trade Talks Episode 120: Extreme Trade: The Rise and Fall of Glasgow’s Shipbuilding

What is the Glasgow effect? Richard Davies explains, and tells the gripping economic story of how shipbuilding drove the Scottish city's boom and bust. Drawing from Davies's new book Extreme Economies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020), Davies, Keynes, and Bown discuss how the economic forces of Marshallian externalities drove the rise of Glaswegian shipbuilding on the River Clyde. They then turn to the combination of factors that led to its downfall, and the numerous economic and social policy failures that have given rise to Glasgow's extremely low life expectancy.