PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

WESTERN MAIL ARTICLE DEC 23RD 2011 Over the last year, the manufacturing sector, ignored for so long by politicians, has now become a favoured industry again. With the UK Government partially pinning its hopes on an export led recovery, policymakers are looking to refocus their efforts on manufacturers, especially those in high technology sectors. In fact, whilst manufacturing only accounts for 10 per cent of the UK economy, it generated some £205bn in exported goods in 2009, representing approximately 53 per cent of total UK export by value. This refocusing on the manufacturing sector could be particularly good news for Wales, especially as the industry is mainly located outside the south east of England and any growth in the sector will have a disproportionate effect on the less prosperous parts of the UK, such as the Welsh economy. As the First Minister said recently, “Manufacturing is vital to the economy in Wales and should be considered at least as important as financia...

I inadvertently forgot to publish this article on the blog last month as I was away travelling.  Still, better late than never. DAILY POST COLUMN 28th November 2011 Is the Labour Party in Wales in danger of believing that it has almost a divine right to rule in the Assembly? That seems to be the impression one would assume from the recent spat between Welsh Labour and the Electoral Reform Society (ERS). The argument all stems from the announcement earlier this month that Labour wants to have a first past the post system for all Assembly seats if there are boundary changes to Wales. This would mean that if Labour had its way, there would be two seats for each of the thirty new constituencies.  This would, according to a report from the ERS, give Labour 70 per cent of the seats with only 40 per cent of the vote. Such a democratic imbalance would perturb anybody and it is only right that an organisation such as the ERS, which believes in a more pr...

Given my love for all things Finnish, this is one new programme that policymakers could and should be emulating. The Aalto Venture Garage , part of the newly formed Aalto University, is a co-working space and seed accelerator in the Nordics and Baltics, providing a free 700m open space for hackers and startups. It operates from a big industrial hall whose interiors have been optimised for entrepreneurs to work together. Shipping containers have also been brought in to create extra rooms, with even their roofs being transformed into office space, with stairs leading to the top and onto a maze of chairs and tables. Its programmes include the Startup Sauna, which claims to be the leading open sourced seed accelerator for early-stage startups in Northern Europe and Russia. Startup Sauna pushes the selected startups develop to a stage where they are ready to take over the international markets, using coaching from some of the region’s best serial entrepreneurs, investors and other prof...

They say a picture can take the place of a thousand words. Below is the relative contribution of the manufacturing industry and the public sector to the Welsh economy for the period 1997-2009. And the graph below is the overall monetary contribution of the manufacturing industry and the public sector (in £million) to the Welsh economy for the same period.

Last Wednesday, the latest GVA (Gross Value Added) data was released by the Office for National Statistics. It showed that this measure of prosperity had, following the recession of 2009, increased in all UK regions. The good news for Wales is that, along with the East Midlands, it had the fastest growth in GVA/head of population in 2010 at 3.3 per cent. Before anyone gets excited about this news, it can probably be explained by the fact that both regions are the most manufacturing intensive in Britain and that the brief export led recovery experienced in 2010 was beneficial, at least in the short term. In fact, the bad news was that Wales is still the poorest part of the UK with a GVA/head of £15,145. In contrast, the richest part of the UK – London – had a GVA per head of £35,026. And if we look at the growth of London since 1999, the year of the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales, the economic prosperity of Britain’s capital city has grown by 73 per cent. In co...

With a difficult year coming to an end, there will be a host of predictions over what will happen to the economy in 2012. Here is a list from one of my favourite magazines, Entrepreneur , which tries to work out not only what the economy will look like but, more importantly, what trends will affect the small business sector. Yes, it is US-orientated but how many of these will also apply here in the UK? 1.Volatility ahead. With Europe now teetering, economic uncertainty will remain the big issue for every small business owner, with 44 percent of owners naming it the "one thing that stands between where you are today and growing your company," a Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute study found. Winners will have flexible long- and short-term plans so they can shift gears quickly. 2."Right-time" multichannel marketing . Watch for new tools that will help business owners better analyze complex customer behavior and comments on various social-media ...

As those who read this blog regularly are no doubt aware, I believe passionately in entrepreneurship as the main vehicle by which the global economy can recover again after the worst recession since the 1920s. In my opinion, the passion, creativity, innovation, perseverance and sheer hard work of entrepreneurs are the vital ingredients needed to get economies moving again. Given this, I was hoping that the latest data on business births and deaths, published by the Office for National Statistics last week, would have some good news for the Welsh economy and show that it was on the road to recovery. Unfortunately, my optimism was misplaced. Instead, the official statistics showed that the situation in Wales was worse than expected, especially compared to the other devolved nations. For example, the data released showed that in 2010, there were 7,505 enterprise births in Wales as compared to 8,325 in 2009. This represented a decline of 9.9 per cent, the worst performance of ...

Last week, I was honoured to be speaking at a conference in Istanbul on the future of the digital economy in Turkey. Attended by around 500 businesspeople, the event brought together speakers from government, academia and industry to discuss how this fast growing sector was having an impact on the economy.  Unlikely as it seems, Turkey has been one of the rare economic success stories of the last couple of years as the rest of the World emerges from recession. Led by its charismatic leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the country’s relative wealth grown by six per cent in 2011 whilst its neighbours to the west have been in the doldrums. In fact, whilst much of the European Union looks set to fall back into recession next year, the Turkish economy looks set to grow again in 2012, albeit at a rate of three per cent. There are numerous reasons to explain this growth, such as the fact that the country has a diversified industrial base, a fairly stable political environm...

The latest sketchbook from the Kauffman Foundation, this time on the sources of funding for entrepreneurs from their own funds to venture capitalists.

Another week, another continent! However, I am really excited to be here in Turkey for the very first time to speak at the Digital Economy e-commerce summit , to be held over the next couple of days in Istanbul. There are over 300 delegates at this conference and, given Turkey's economic growth and the fact that it is in the global top ten of internet usage (with 27 million internet users), the event should be one that creates considerable debate as to how this nation develops in the future. I am particularly looking forward to the speech by David Rowan, editor of Wired magazine , on the ten trends that are going to change the digital economy in the future. Also, as I am sharing the stage tomorrow with Zafer Çağlayan, the Turkish Minister for the Economy, it will also create an opportunity to see whether we can link in Welsh fast growth firms into this growing economy. More on this later.