This article by Carl Richardson originally appeared in the Express & Star newspaper on the 28th August, 2024.
While Great Britain may have finished seventh in the medal table at the recent Paris Olympics, the latest report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development showed that the UK had surged to fourth place on a list of the world’s largest exporters.
This ranking placed the country behind only China, the US and Germany in terms of the total value of exported goods and services, with Japan, France and the Netherlands all being overtaken based on the most recent data from 2022.
With the UK Board of Trade estimating that jobs connected to exporting pay on average 7% more than non-exporting equivalents, this growth in the value of exports, now totalling £855 billion in the data, is certainly to be welcomed.
It should be noted that the UK is still running a total trade deficit, importing more goods and services than we export. However, the growth in exports should surely offer some grounds for cautious optimism about the ongoing prospects for the UK economy in a post Brexit world.
It is within this context that Jonathan Reynolds, the new Secretary of State for Business and Trade, has swiftly highlighted international commerce as a key opportunity for stimulating growth within the UK economy.
Within weeks of settling into his new role, Reynolds has outlined plans to publish a new trade strategy, designed to work ‘in harmony’ with the government’s industrial strategy.
Reynolds has highlighted six partners as a focus for trade negotiations, with the somewhat eclectic group comprising India, Israel, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes the UAE and Saudi Arabia. These planned trade negotiations sit alongside a stated aim to ‘reset’ the relationship with the EU by revisiting the Trade and Cooperation Agreement that came into force in 2021.
While Reynolds is the ninth Business and Trade Secretary (and its previous iterations) in the past nine years, the revolving door in Whitehall has done relatively little to damage Britain’s strategic approach to developing trade policy over that period. For that, the efforts of our civil service - often caught in the cross-hairs of political debate - are to be applauded. It must also be hoped that a period of greater ministerial stability now follows, allowing for further gains in the field of trade to be made.
Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are notoriously difficult to complete. Recent years have seen the UK sign such deals with Japan, Australia and New Zealand, alongside a digital trade agreement with Singapore. Entry into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trading block, whose members have combined economies representing almost 12% of global GDP, has also been agreed and is expected to take effect before the end of the year.
At the same time, existing discussions with India over an FTA have proceeded slowly since they began in earnest in January 2022; this despite being an area of particular focus for Kemi Badenoch, the previous Trade Secretary.
A full FTA with the US also seems as distant a prospect as ever, although the last government did demonstrate a good amount of entrepreneurial flair in signing trade related memoranda of understanding with a number of US states in recent years, including economic powerhouses, Texas and Florida.
Whilst Jonathan Reynolds made no mention of these in his recent comments about future trading plans, it is hoped that the good work done to date might continue and discussions that were active under the previous government, such as those with California and Illinois, will conclude for the ultimate benefit of firms in the UK.
Our own international investment business continues to regard the US as a key market, alongside the likes of Singapore, Canada, Australasia and of course the UK.
Despite recent market volatility and the upcoming presidential election, one cannot help but to be mindful of Warren Buffet’s frequently quoted conclusion in his 2021 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders that, “for 240 years it’s been a terrible mistake to bet against America.”
Earlier this year we partnered with New York City based Leeds Equity Partners to invest in education and training sectors across North America and we continue to explore a range of new investment opportunities from east to west coast.
Equally, our business is also mindful of a rapidly developing market that has less traditional geographical ties to nation states, namely space.
While the idea of business in space has long felt like the purview of science fiction writers and something for the future, the reality is that the space sector is already a meaningful contributor to the world economy.
SpaceX may be the current ‘pin up’ for the industry, but Britain is also very active in this field. The UK Space Agency estimates that there were nearly 1,600 organisations with space-related activities, directly employing close to 50,000 people and a further 78,000 in the supply chain, which generated over £17 billion in income in 2020/21.
Commercially, the sector may still be in its relative infancy but it is developing rapidly with so much of what we consider to be day to day life on planet earth now influenced in one way or another by activity taking place miles above our heads (for the statistically minded reader, the Karman Line which marks the ‘official’ boundary of space is 62 miles above sea level). And that is before we even touch upon the military and defence-related implications of activity in space.
To aid our understanding of this sector, our business is hosting an event in central Birmingham on the 19th September with a number of leading lights operating in the commercial space sector, including the former RAF Air Vice Marshall who was instrumental in the creation of UK Space Command and also the former head of Spaceport Cornwall. It promises to be an insightful evening and one that will better inform guests about realistic and current commercial opportunities in space.
Domestically, space policy making sits with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. But as Jonathan Reynolds sits around the cabinet table with his new brief and ambitions to deliver trade and industrial strategies that will stimulate the UK economy, it is to be hoped that the opportunities that sit above us with the stars might be considered across government departments as much as those which undoubtedly exist around the world.
After all, to ‘go boldly’ is not the worst aspiration one can have.
Link here to the original article in the Express & Star:
Comentarios