1 Introduction 1

2 The Growth and Convergence Literature 4

  2.1 Regional inequality in the UK: the recent evidence 6

3 Measuring Levels, Growth Rates and Convergence in Multivariate Ordinal Outcome Environments 7

  3.1 Measuring convergence in joint distributions 7

  3.2 Level and growth measurement in cardinal paradigms: a reinterpretation 8

  3.3 Level, growth and difference measures in ordered categorical paradigms 9

  3.4 Multidimensionality 11

4 Regional Growth in the UK 2010-2018: Levelling up or Not? 11

  4.1 Data 12

  4.2 Overall well-being growth and levelling up: 2010-2018

  4.3 The four underlying univariate distributionsL age, human resource, health and income 17

    4.3.1 Age distribution 17

    4.3.2 Human resource distribution 19

    4.3.3 Health distribution 19

    4.3.4 Income distribution 20

5 Conclusions 21