PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

With the local authority elections taking place in Wales next week, a number of lobbying and membership organisations have produced a range of policy papers over the last few months highlighting some of the key issues that councils could tackle when they are re-elected. One of the most relevant of these is the report from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) entitled a “Vision for Welsh Towns” which has examined the main challenges, issues and opportunities for town centres across Wales.  Given the diversity of town centres, there is unlikely to be one simple solution to the issues raised in the report. Nevertheless, the study should give food for thought not only to local authorities on the way forward for towns across Wales but also to other key stakeholders including the Welsh Government, the UK Government and private business. So what do the public in Wales think about the state of their towns? Unfortunately, the research shows that two thirds of those interviewed described...

Earlier this week, the Scottish Government published a new National Strategy for Economic Transformation. This contains seventy actions across five key priority programmes which, following a detailed analysis of Scotland’s economic strengths and weaknesses, have been identified as having the greatest potential to deliver economic growth. Given that there is no similar economic strategy here in Wales, it provides an interesting framework for the Welsh Government to examine in terms of approach over the next four years. I was particularly excited to see that one of the key priority programmes will focus on entrepreneurship to create a culture which entrepreneurship is encouraged, supported and celebrated. To achieve this, it will focus on four key projects that will result in Scotland being recognised as one of the best countries in the world to start and grow a business, surely something that should be an ambition here in Wales as well. The first of these projects is that of embedding t...

 Earlier this week, data from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation showed that there were 1.7 million active job adverts in the UK during the last week of August with around 193,000 new job adverts posted during those seven days.  In fact, its research shows that the number of new jobs being advertised has remained high over the last three months with Wales having the highest active job postings during this period. However, as the press has highlighted recently, all businesses (but especially those in the hospitality and haulage industries) have struggled to get the workers they need with some having no option but to reduce their operations as a result. Of course, the jobs market is still not as clear cut as it was prior to the pandemic, and we will have to wait and see how the gradual closure of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme – where employers could furlough those employees at risk of redundancy due to the pandemic – will pan out in terms of creating opportuniti...

As restrictions have been lifted across the UK, there is an expectation that many employers will be looking to bring their workers back to the office after nearly eighteen months of working remotely.  But will everything return to normal or has the pandemic irrevocably changed the way we work and, more importantly, where we work? One indication as to the way that the post-pandemic future of work may pan out come from freelancing platform Upwork, which recently surveyed 4000 adults in the USA to understand the views of office workers on remote work and flexibility. The results are fascinating and, if repeated here across the Atlantic, present some key challenges to both employers and policymakers. With the economy reopening, it is not unsurprising to find that the survey suggests that whilst two thirds will be returning to the office for some of their time. However, only a quarter are excited about this compared to a third who were not.   This result had more to do with wh...

When I undertook the Access to Finance for SMEs review for the Welsh Government seven years ago, the most invaluable source of data for the investigation was the SME Finance Monitor.  The information gathered by the largest study of its kind in the UK not only provided accurate and timely data on how SMEs were accessing funding from a range of different sources but was also a useful predictor of the state of the small firm community. Given this, the latest report from the monitor on how SMEs have been impacted by Covid 19 is an invaluable indicator of what has been happening to entrepreneurs across the UK during the recent pandemic with 4,511 interviews conducted between April and June 2020. Not surprisingly, it found that 87% of SMEs had reported being negatively affected by Covid 19 with the biggest impact being a reduction in sales of more than 50%.  In fact, six out of ten SMEs were expecting this lower turnover to continue over the next few months with the biggest impact ...

When I undertook the Access to Finance review for the Welsh Government that culminated in the recommendation for a Development Bank for Wales, it was important to ensure that detailed research was undertaken to demonstrate the case for closing the finance gap faced by small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Given that prior studies had showed that, in general, SMEs had encountered increased difficulties to access bank credit following the global financial crisis, we wanted to understand if this was the case in Wales and whether the geographical location of banks across the UK had any impact on SME access to bank finance. To do this, we analysed data on bank lending gathered by the SME Finance Monitor which, since 2011, has questioned 5,000 different SMEs quarterly in the UK about their borrowing events. More than 65,000 interviews have now been conducted as part of this survey, building into a considerable dataset on the past and future finance needs of SMEs in the UK. We hav...

Twenty-one years ago this week, I was appointed to my first professorial chair in entrepreneurship at the University of Glamorgan. Since then, I have been lucky to have had a wonderful career which has taken me across the World and presented me with incredible opportunities to engage with so many individuals and organisations and hopefully help make a difference to people’s lives. One of those opportunities that I value tremendously is my annual visit to Dublin, where I am privileged to chair the International Assessment Board for the Irish Research Council’s Enterprise Partnership Scheme. This is an innovative initiative where the Council, working with private enterprises and public bodies, awards scholarships to the most promising researchers in Ireland, offering them the opportunity to gain real world experience by working on a project with a non-academic organisation. In return, industry gets access to an exceptional pool of competitively selected, high-calibre researche...

Following last week’s Budget, it wasn’t going to be too hard to predict that, yet again, the opposition parties in Westminster would go on the airwaves demanding a u-turn from the Chancellor of the Exchequer on fiscal and economic policy. Yet it must have given George Osborne a considerable degree of comfort that the consensus from leading business organisations such as the CBI and the IOD is that reducing the deficit must be the overriding priority for the UK economy in the short to medium term. Indeed, it was generally agreed by the business community that there was actually very little scope for any major decisions, within the current financial situation, to turn around an economy that seems now to be largely dependent on whether greater confidence can be generated within the business community and amongst consumers which, in turn, seems to be dependent on whether further euro-crises are avoided. And ignoring the potential effect of Cypriot bank meltdowns, that is probably ...

The Republic of Ireland was one of the economies hardest hit by the recent global recession. With unemployment reaching 15 per cent earlier this year and the Irish Government having to make austerity cuts that make those emanating from Whitehall look positively generous in comparison, there remained serious doubts as to whether the Celtic Tiger could recover any of its bite during the next decade. Yet despite these challenges, the new Irish Government has begun a serious fightback and is continuing to look to innovation as the key driver in growing its economy for the future. In particular, it is developing key strategies that are focusing on those areas of the economy it sees as being critical in transforming the business sector over the next decade. One of these is the so-called Green Economy that encompasses a range of activities spread across different sectors that have the common objective of providing goods and services in a sustainable way that reduces the impact on t...