Thursday, February 16, 2006

Keeping the UK Competitive

I'm sure I read somewhere the other day that UK economic productivity is at a fifteen year low. Entrepreneurs are increasingly reluctant to start up new businesses and feel over-burdened by red tape and regulation. Indeed, the only growth sector at the moment appears to be the public sector. And yet despite all this GDP growth seems to be a relatively stable 2-3% per annum. It's interesting to see that a new pressure group has launched called Keeping the UK Competitive. Despite its name it seems to be prioritising London as a focus for investment, which I suppose is hardly surprising as London First are the prime movers behind it. The focus of this group seems to be asking for additional public sector investment, but surely it's the private sector we need to be encouraging at a time of low economic productivity? I can foresee similar groups to this - albeit it private sector ones - being formed all over the country as different regions wake up to the fact that private sector enterprise is gradually being strangled at birth.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

& of course, aside form the red tape, the increasing tax grab isn't going to do much to attract investment to these shores.

Good article here on this,

http://tinyurl.com/86nu8

Quote

David Smith, chief economist at Williams de Broƫ, said:

“These new figures show that Brown has resocialised the British economy and squandered the Thatcher legacy. The British political class must answer a simple question: why should Britain’s growth rate and structural rate of employment continue to be higher than that the pathetic rate of Germany or Italy now that we are adopting their tax and spending levels?”

snip

"“It is hard to see why any foreign investor would want to touch the UK economy with a barge pole.”