Ex post analysis of the regional impacts of major infrastructure: the Channel Tunnel 10 years on.

increase in traffic might be expected to have indirect and induced impacts on
employment in the wider transport sector. In practice the job losses in the port and
ferry industry have been greater and the compensating job creation smaller than
forecast. Eurotunnel’s UK employees peaked at just over 1500 in 2000, but this does
not include the large numbers of sub-contractors, immigration, police and customs
officials. If we just look at the change in port and ferry employment we can identify as
loss of some 6000 jobs in Dover alone from 1991 to 2001 reducing its share of local
employment from 18.4% to just 3.8%. This would have been catastrophic for the
local economy if all the employment had been locally resident, but shift patterns on
ferries led to a fairly wide distribution of residential locations. However, this loss
came on top of the closure of the other major local industry coal mining at the same
time.

4.3 Impacts on other sectors

Turning to the wider influence of the Tunnel on the Kent Economy, the key issue is
whether the Tunnel been successful in stimulating the expansion of indigenous firms
and the attraction of new firms to locate in Kent. We have focused the analysis on the
four specific sectors that were identified in the ex-ante studies: tourism, retailing,
manufacturing and logistics and distribution

If we look first at new registrations of foreign firms in Kent, Figure 9 shows clearly a
strong growth throughout the period, peaking in 2001. These figures, however, reflect
national patterns in inward investment, with the peak being influenced by significant
merger and acquisition activity. Of these some sixty are French companies that are
geographically fairly evenly distributed between the Channel Corridor, North Kent
(including Medway) and West Kent (for an earlier analysis see Collier and
Vickerman, 2002). The highest employment by these French owned companies in
Kent is in transport and storage (28%) followed by financial intermediation (27%) and
manufacturing (25%).

□ No. of Overseas Firms
Registering in Kent

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Λ^ς> Λ^ς>∖¾^ς> Λ^ς> Λ⁴> _nζ? ʃ

Figure 9: Overseas Companies in Kent by Year of Registration (1984 - 2002)

Source: SEEDA, taken from Experian Database, October 2003

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