It is a pleasure to welcome this report, which I was pressing for. Wales sits within the UK economy and the global marketplace, and we all need to pull together in both the Welsh and the UK Governments to provide the best opportunities for Wales in a changing environment to give Wales the tools to do the job. I will cover the basic ground of the report and what we should be doing in Wales, including in the councils, focusing primarily, as has been said, on the UK Government’s responsibilities to present Wales as an accessible, adaptable and attractive location for inward investment in a global marketplace.
Obviously, we cannot compete on labour costs with China, as we did in the past, but we have electronic global market reach and clearly competitiveness is about
added value and skills. Emerging markets in China, India and south America should be seen as major opportunities for emerging consumer markets of high value products, whether arts or science-led, for the Welsh economy. We should refocus our efforts in that way.
Following the global financial tsunami in 2008, Wales is particularly vulnerable, because the proportion of people in the public sector is greater, and as the Government begin to reduce the investment in public sector jobs and wages, consumer demand is disproportionately hit. We know that the root of very low or static growth in the UK is the collapse of consumer demand, which was still going up in 2010, albeit with a deficit, but the announcement of 500,000 job cuts deflated that and we are now bouncing along. The issue is to keep money going into local economies, and to target investment in the most productive area.