PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

It would seem that Alistair Darling has finally given into pressure from the various business lobby groups and will not implement a five per cent increase in business rates in England although firms will still face a two per cent increase. However, as pointed out in the blog entry yesterday and in the Western Mail on Saturday , business rates is a devolved matter. The question is whether the Assembly will, as in the past, blindly follow the Chancellor's decision or will finally do the right thing and refuse any increase in business rates at all for this year. With this decision, the Assembly has finally been given the opportunity to do something different to England in terms of fiscal policy. For the sake of businesses across Wales, let's hope it does.

As readers of this blog will know by now, I am a passionate supporter of reducing business rates for small firms in Wales. In devolution terms, it is the only real financial instrument available to the Welsh Assembly Government and whilst it does not have power to reduce corporation tax, it does have responsibility for business rates which affects every single business in our economy. Therefore, at a time when analysts predict that Wales is one of the UK regions that will take longest to come out recession, why do we have the grotesque spectacle of ministers within our Assembly Government announcing that business rates will be raised by a minimum of five per cent in April? Why does the Assembly Government, which has the power to do things differently, meekly follow the line of the UK Government at a time when every pound saved is critical to the survival of businesses throughout this nation? This would have been expected from those Labour politicians who penalised thousands of small fi...

Having just come back from another week in Finland, I seemed to have missed all the fun and furore over the "aneurin glyndwr" website established by members of the Welsh Labour Party. The question is whether anyone cares outside of the Cardiff Bay/Eli Jenkins political bubble and, for that matter, the Welsh political blogosphere? I very much doubt it, although those who live by the media (or multimedia) sword.....

An article in this week's Times Higher shows that Welsh universities are falling behind their English counterparts in terms of research funding. According to the academics' trade paper "Universities in Wales have been left aggrieved by the news that this year's increase in research funding is half that enjoyed by English institutions. Concerns have been raised by individual universities and by their representative body Higher Education Wales (HEW) that last week's grant allocations will leave them struggling to compete. Whereas research funding for English universities has increased by 8 per cent for the next academic year, their counterparts in Wales received a rise of 4 per cent. The biggest loser was Cardiff University, which got £2.2 million less for research, while the largest percentage increases in research money went to teaching-led institutions such as Swansea Metropolitan University. Teresa Rees, pro vice-chancellor for research at Cardiff, warned that th...

A marvellous article by Simon Jenkins in the Evening Standard today , which condemns the whole fiasco that has become the G20 summit. As he writes "A day and a half of summitry, parroting meetings held by the same participants every month, will cost Londoners £7 million in police overtime and a further £12 million in other costs. That is apart from the disruption. The event displays the Olympian extravagance now typical of many public-sector events, undimmed by a concern for recession, decorum or economy. One firm is reported to have been paid £6 million for fitting out the chamber for two days. A project co-ordinator and two "delivery co-ordinators" are being paid £200,000, and an obscurely titled "content writer" £27,000. If a minister ever tells you he is too short of money for a clinic or drug centre, cite these figures." At least it will give the Prime Minister the opportunity to say that he has saved the World (again).

If there was evidence that Europe will not follow Gordon Brown's high spending policies, it came from the European Commission today which set deadlines for the UK (which is outside the eurozone) to rein in its budget deficit. I wonder whether the EU representative at the G20 summit will reiterate this call and make the case for less public expenditure by governemnts globally. More importantly, I wonder how the PM will react to this, especially as it would seem that no-one in Europe is following his policies.

Last week, we saw the level of unemployment go over 2 million for the first time in over twelve years, with forecasters expecting it to hit 3 million by 2010. In Wales, the number of those out of work has reached 109,000, an increase of 57 per cent since last year, which is worse than any other region. This follows the International Monetary Fund's announcement that the UK faces a worse recession than the USA and Europe and that it will take up to a decade for employment in Wales to get back to pre-recession levels. In addition, average earnings, including bonuses, rose only 1.8 per cent in the last twelve months, the lowest annual rise since records began in 1991. As would be expected in the middle of such a crisis, we have had scheme after scheme announced by the UK Government to try and alleviate the pain felt by families and businesses across the land. However, despite the grand announcements by Ministers, it seems that very little is actually happening. Take, for example, t...

Today, we welcome our Celtic cousins from Ireland to what promises to be a fantastic rugby match and an occasion for all of us to savour, whatever the result. Like long-lost cousins, the tens of thousands of fans coming over to Cardiff will be given a welcome they will never forget. Old acquaintances will be renewed and new friendships made as our teams battle it out for the Triple Crown and the Six Nations Championship, although it is likely that the Irish economy will not be the most popular topic of conversation over a pint or two of Guinness this weekend. Despite the success of the previous 15 years when Ireland surpassed the economic growth rates of the rest of Europe and attracted the presence of a range of global giants such as Microsoft, Google and Intel, the recent recession has hit the Emerald Isle hardest of all during the past six months. On St Patrick’s Day, the Irish Finance Minister warned that the effects of a domestic housing crisis feeding into the banking system had ...

As someone who dreads doing live TV but enjoys the experience afterwards, it could be argued that there I suffer from some strain of delayed media masochism. I experienced that feeling again last night when I was honoured to be a panellist on Pawb a’i Farn. For those of you who have never appeared on a live show, it can be a daunting experience but one that is highly enjoyable. At the beginning, you are nervously thinking how on earth am I going to be able to last an hour but, by the end, it has become thoroughly enjoyable and the time has, actually, flown by. The other guests on the show last night were Rhodri Morgan, Dafydd Wigley and Lord Roger Roberts. To say that Rhodri and I have never seen eye to eye would be an understatement, but no-one can doubt that he has left an indelible impression on Welsh politics. Probably only Dafydd Wigley – who retired from day-to-day political life in 2003 – could be said to be in the same league and when Rhodri leaves in September, he will undoubt...

The latest unemployment figures for Wales have seen those out of work reach 109,000, an increase of 57 per cent since the same time last year, which is worse than any other region of the UK. This comes on the back of news from the IMF that the UK faces a worse recession than the USA and Europe.

The last month saw a highly divisive split within Plaid Cymru over the issue of top up fees within our universities. So what was all the fuss about? Simply put, Welsh students who study in Wales currently pay £1,285 a year towards the costs of their tuition, rather than the full fee of up to £3,225 they would otherwise pay. In contrast, students in England are charged the full top up fees and it was a combination of Plaid, Lib Dem and Conservative Assembly Members who ensured that Welsh students were subsidised to attend university. The same parties fought the 2007 Assembly election promising that they would not make students pay the extra top up fees. However, now Plaid is in Government with Labour, it has now decided to scrap the fee subsidy and focus some of the funds saved on those from the poorest families. Why would Plaid and Labour want to do that? The answer is simple – money. There is currently a £61 million funding gap between English and Welsh universities and politicians ha...

According to the forecasters Oxford Economics , up to one million workers are set to lose their jobs over the next two years, with Wales taking up to a decade to recover pre -recession job levels. On top of that news, the FSB predicts that up to 1,200 small firms in Wales could go bust by the end of the year. What should the Assembly Government do? Certainly, the ProAct scheme which has been trumpeted across the press has come into some criticism within Whitehall, which seems reluctant to support its expansion across the rest of the UK. The solution is clearly one of confidence, which begins by getting credit out to business, something which this government has failed to do. Has the Assembly Government seriously examined the use of European Funding to do this, as suggested on this blog last year? I could be wrong but there seems little evidence of this and very little impetus to get cash out to Welsh companies.

It would seem that the MBA qualification comes in for a bit of a bashing today in two of our more august economic publications. In the article by Stefan Stern in the FT , there is a discussion of the caricature of the MBA graduate as "fast-tracked and hot-housed, this aspiring master of the universe is supremely confident. He or she will have rapidly acquired enough knowledge of finance, marketing and the rest to launch a brilliant corporate career or, better still, glide straight into an elite strategy firm or investment bank. This steady flow of cocky graduates helped sustain market excess, the MBA-haters maintain. Their arrogance led to the collapse that now afflicts us all." Another, this time in the Economist , questions the quantitative rigour of MBA courses and suggests that "business schools should encourage more specialisation and make the requirements for the different disciplines more demanding. This will still not give an MBA the same quantitative skills a ph...

The Sunday Times has an article today on how the recession is depressing high streets across the UK. For Wales, and Anglesey in particular, it does not make happy reading with three towns in the top ten of Britain’s worst-hit high streets. Holyhead is the worst, with 39% of all shops in the high street being empty and llangefni , the second major town on the island, having just under a quarter of its shops empty. Holyhead (39%) Beckton , London (37%) Rochdale (29%) Blaydon , Tyne and Wear (28%) Rotherham (26%) Barry, South Glamorgan (24%) Kirkintilloch , Glasgow (24%) Loughborough (24%) Llangefni , North Wales (23%) Small Heath, Birmingham (23%) So what can be done. A number of solutions are suggested, including Rates freeze - Retailers want Alistair Darling, the chancellor, to freeze a 5% increase in business rates due next month Upward rent review - Clauses that allow landlords to raise rents automatically should be scrapped, argues the British Retail Consortium Emergency powe...

As I mentioned on Wednesday, I was honoured to be part of a double act with the great Gareth Edwards at the mediawales offices in Cardiff eralier this week where we both took part in a question and answer session on the economy and rugby. Whilst most of the questions to Gareth were about the successful rebirth of the Welsh rugby team over the last few years, the outstanding sevens win in Dubai and the recent decline of the English team, one of the gathered crowd also asked whether Wales should host another rugby World Cup here in Wales in 2015. More specifically, given the fact that the Assembly and the Welsh FA have given up on the European Championship bid , whether Wales had the financial clout to be able to underwrite the £80 million needed for a successful bid to the International Rugby Board. Quite rightly, Gareth focused on whether Wales can afford not to get involved in such a global event and if we are to be an ambitious forward looking nation, we must always strive to be amon...

It has been a pretty hectic working week all round, given the continued development of the Prince of Wales Innovation Scholarships programme and the success our team has had in Japan in engaging with both top universities and a number of leading R&D companies. We are also getting enormous interest from the USA with two companies already asking to take on scholars outside of our main funding programme. However, there were three interesting personal events this week. First of all, I finally met one of my sporting heroes, Gareth Edwards , when we were the double act at a MediaWales launch event in Cardiff. Both Gareth and I are columnists for the Western Mail and had to face a barrage of questions from a gathering of the great and good of the business world, on the economy and rugby (Gareth spoke little about the former and I said nothing about the latter!) The second was an interview with Nature magazine , arguably one of the most influential science journals in the World. When I was...

During the last couple of weeks, politicians and pundits have been obsessed with the issue of Sir Fred Goodwin's pension. Indeed, even within a celebrity obsessed British press, you would be surprised to learn that there have been as many news articles on the fate of the former chief executive of RBS as those covering Jade Goody and her battle with cancer. Personally, I believe Fred Goodwin’s pension settlement is abhorrent at a time when thousands of his own former staff at RBS are being made redundant and his actions over badly managed finance deals - such as the overpriced purchase of the Dutch bank ABN Amro - have seriously weakened the UK banking sector. Dealing with this issue can wait a few months and it certainly should not be the main priority for those managing the UK economy and such a distraction will not help one bit in saving the British economy. Of course, it probably suits the UK Government that the ire of the public has been temporarily diverted away from its own i...

This is a headline I have been waiting all my life for. OK, it is not the 15 man game but for the Welsh Sevens team to have lifted the World Cup Sevens trophy in Dubai tonight is an amazing achievement. They even beat the mighty All-Blacks on the way to the final, where they overcame Argentina 19-12. A fantastic result!

You will excuse me for being indulgent today but having blogged on subjects as diverse as China, Bute Park and the future of the British pub during the past few weeks, I thought I would take this opportunity to describe some of the work I am developing as Director of Research and Innovation at the University of Wales. What has become clear to an increasing number of us is that even within the most technologically advanced economies, and despite the best efforts of businesses and academia, not all of the innovation needed to drive competitive economies can be developed internally With the growing realisation that there is a need to attract the best global talent to boost innovation potential, both the USA and mainland Europe have undertaken recruitment drives to increase postgraduate numbers from abroad by offering attractive packages to win a bigger share of this lucrative market. In contrast, the UK is cutting scholarships to overseas students and leading academics are becoming concer...

During the last week, I have been back at Turku working on developing a major project on innovation as well as undertaking some teaching in entrepreneurship. Of interest is the fact that very few of the students wish to get involved in enterprise and are taking the course to understand small business, with the excuse being that, in their opinion, young people are never successful at starting businesses. Hopefully, i will have changed their minds by the end of the course! Well, here is the proof that suggests that enterprise is alive and well amongst some teenagers around the World.

Whatever you say about our First Minister, he surely knows how to speak his mind, often without any thought of the consequences. Of course, in the age of 'speak your weight' politicians, such candour can be refreshing but can also, if misinterpreted, be potentially damaging. Today's interview in the Western Mail is one such example. Whilst rightly predicting that the USA would remain Wales’ most important trading partner, he then goes on to say that "There are some things which despite the huge technological advances America has they are hopeless at. One of them is beer and the other is cheese and I think we can help fill the gap in both cases. American cheese is dreadful, absolutely dreadful, and their beer isn’t much better.” I must admit that I am quite partial to a bit of Monterey Jack and a pint of Sam Adams when over the pond but clearly the First Minister feels otherwise, although whether he should say it just before going on a trade visit to our most important ...

Yesterday, news arrived that the Italian firm Indesit - based at Bodelwyddan - had decided to close its North Wales plant with the loss of 305 jobs. The question is whether other companies will now follow its lead? In my opinion, the answer is yes, and we can expect many more overseas investors to begin retrenching and pull back to their home countries during the next six months, resulting in a further rapid fall in employment within well paid sectors of the economy. Unless there is an unlikely upturn in economic fortunes over the next couple of months, there are numerous companies poised to close their operations in Wales resulting in thousands of further job losses. More worryingly, if President Obama, as expected, goes ahead with his "America First" policies, then US businesses, which are the largest grouping of inward investors in Wales, may well reconsider their position and follow the lead of European firms such as Indesit. Update: I hate to say I told you so but two ot...

On the day that the Assembly Government launches its strategy for child poverty, figures were released today regarding the number of NEETS in Wales. NEETS are those young people who are not in education, employment or training and I first blogged on this phenomenon over two years ago . The figures are shocking. In 1999, there were 50,000 NEETS in Wales aged between 16 and 24. By 2006, this had risen to 55,200, a rise of more than ten per cent. In the last three years alone, there has been an increase of over 5,000, mainly among 19-24 year olds. This is despite tens of millions of pounds of Assembly and European funding being spent on this problem. Something is seriously going wrong with the whole approach to supporting young people within our poorest communities and rather than announcing another strategy, perhaps the politicians and their civil servants could try and explain why the situation is getting worse, and not better, in Wales, and do something constructive about it

According to the BBC, Scotland and Wales have now ditched plans for a joint bid to host Euro 2016 because of the global economic crisis. Deputy first minister and minister for economy and transport Ieuan Wyn Jones said the money required was excessive. "The cost of bringing other venues up to this standard would run into tens of millions of pounds," he said. "In the current economic and financial climate, this is unaffordable." There are a number issues with this statement: (a) the European Championship isn't until 2016 - does the Assembly Government now think the recession will last another seven years? (b) one of the main reasons for abandoning the bid is that "Both countries would have had to spend many millions upgrading and building new stadia for the tournament". However, I was under the impression that the main thrust of government interventions with the recession was to bring forward capital projects for local construction workers. (c) major sp...

It would seem that not even the most innovative and competitive economies are immune from recession. I am currently in Finland where news emerged yesterday that the economy shrank the most in 17 years in the fourth quarter. GDP fell 1.3 percent from the previous three months and unemployment rose to 7 per cent. It may also contract by as much as 4.4 percent in 2009. The main problem is exports, which accounts for more than a third of Finland's economy. During the last three months of 2008, exports fell by an annual 14 percent and its main European markets - Sweden, Germany and the U.K. are already in recession. It will therefore be interesting to see how the Turku Innovation Platform project will be received by policymakers when we meet later this week. Certainly, we hope to link into this from Wales and ensure that we can form stronger relationships with Finnish firms and universities,