PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

Last week, the latest data was published on the number of new businesses being created in Wales and showed that there were 8,270 enterprise births during 2012. As a proportion of all Welsh businesses, this equates to a birthrate of 9.4 per cent as compared to a UK birth rate of 11.4 per cent. Only Northern Ireland was ranked lower out of the twelve UK regions. Whilst there is a growing commitment by the Welsh Government towards developing greater entrepreneurship across Wales, there remain considerable challenges in ensuring that more people start their own businesses, especially in high growth sectors. Therefore, should we be looking elsewhere for inspiration? As a regular visitor to Singapore in recent years, I have become aware that the government of this small island economy has, for the past decade, been promoting entrepreneurship as a viable career choice and cultivating an enterprising mindset among its citizens. More relevantly, much of this entrepreneurial focus ...

Last week, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer was announcing his measures for getting the British economy back on track, one of the most productive and innovative smaller economies in the World was also starting to implement its own budget measures to restructure its economy over the next few years. And unlike George Osborne, Tharman Shanmugaratnam – the Finance Minister for Singapore – decided that the restructuring of his nation’s economy over the next three years would be focused on supporting a dynamic small to medium sized enterprise (SME) sector. This would be achieved through developing a “Quality Growth Programme” to help businesses upgrade their facilities, create better jobs and raise wages. It would also focus specifically on improving productivity for individual companies and specific industries. One of the measures introduced under this plan that will certainly raise eyebrows in Europe is the support that the Singaporean Government is giving small businesses to rais...

Arrived in Singapore yesterday afternoon for a four day jetlagged visit. Given the fact that the island economy is still seen as one of the growth regions of the World, it is always revealing to examine what has been going on in recent months. Certainly, growth has been outstripping that of the UK, with the Straits Times reporting that Singapore's economy is expected to grow by around 5 per cent in 2011. Despite this good news, the expansion of the economy is not expected to last and is expected to slow down next year - growth is estimated at  anywhere between 1 and 3 per cent. The last time Singapore experienced such weak growth was in 2008 when the economy expanded by just 1.5 per cent (although it contracted by 0.8 per cent in 2009). However, in calculating the state of the economy in 2012, the Ministry for Trade and Industry has not factored in downside risks to growth, such as that of a worsening debt situation leading to a full-blown financial crisis in...