Finance Sector To Drive Uk Growth

By Author: John Beth
Total Articles: 17
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London Business School recently managed to reunite about 100 representative of the thought leadership and asked which sector would produce most growth for the UK economy. Thought leadership is the quality belonging to those capable of influencing the cultural and economic debate around the world.
Among the panellist of this event entitled “Balancing Britain’s books” were present: Prof. Sir Andrew Likierman, Dean of the LBS; Michael Dyke, Managing Director of Lend Lease; Andrew Scott, Professor of Economics at LBS; Nick Baird, CEO of UKTI; Dale Murray, Angel Investor of the Year 2011 and founder of Omega Logic and Nick Farraway, Senior Vice President Head of Europe of Havells Sylvania.
According to the panellists the sector that will lead the nation’s growth will be the financial services, picked by 52% of the attendees over manufacturing, infrastructure and construction.
As we all can see reading the daily financial news we are still in the middle of the worst financial crisis since 1929 depression and it’s still hard to tell when we will be able to say that we are out of it. Furthermore recent turmoil ...
... in the Eurozone sparked more uncertainty and instability in the world financial market.
But the delegates agreed that the economy in the UK has better perspectives of growth compared to the struggling Eurozone.
Despite the representatives of the world leadership generally agreed on the main role played by the financial sector in UK’s recovery, they still forecast that SMEs can play an important part but their future will depend on structural efficiency improvements.
The main difficulty that businesses up and down the country are facing is that banks are not keen to lend money to finance entrepreneurship making necessary the intervention of venture capitalists and angel investors.
Dale Murray, entrepreneur and Angel Investor of the Year 2011 explained this well: “There are more entrepreneurs and SMEs in the UK than ever before and the greatest challenge that entrepreneurs are facing is gaining access to capital as banks are simply not lending.”
According to Nick Baird of UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) in order to achieve a growth targets and support the SMEs, UK must reduce the trade deficit by “increasing the number of UKTI exporters by 100,000 and increase UK exports from £480 billion to £1 trillion.”
A pretty reassuring outlook for British economy emerged from this encounter of the country’s thought leadership, but must be kept in mind the importance of the structural changes needed to boost SMEs. Banks must be more confident on the ability of British entrepreneurs to succeed and therefore to pay off their debts.

Jonathan Beth is working in the major universities in UK and USA providing leadership programs