Economist interview with Brown

This close to the election things were always going to get tight, but they've tightened up more than anyone thought. With that in mind, here is a transcript of the Economist interviewing Brown on the challenges facing Britain as it heads into the election. For those of us who work on this kind of thing there are interesting statements around industrial policy deep in there, such as -

"And of course you also need a modern industrial policy. That is not the same as the old style of industrial policies. But I’ve just been at a conference of 250 investors in Britain, and what they want to know, is what we are going to do about infrastructure? What are we going to do about digitalisation? What’s going to happen over skills? What’s going to happen over the supply of labour? And science, they want to know got to we’re going to do about science, [in] which we’ve doubled investment over the past ten years. They want to know what we are going to do in all these areas. The old industrial policy is over, but a modern partnership between business and Government on key strategic issues is an essential element of the future direction of our country."

The debate on what industrial policy is, let alone whether it is good for the country, continues ...

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Managing universities

The FT is reporting today that managers in universities have increased in number far faster than academics (see here) claiming that managers have increased in number three times as fast as academics since 2003. An interesting statistics as cuts are falling like hail on universities - will the cuts fall on managers and academics alike? Most likely not ...

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Brown plans for new voting system

Following up on yesterday's post, according to the BBC the Commons will be offered a vote next week on reforming the voting system after the general election. The system on offer is the Alternative Vote system, whereby voters rank the candidates and anyone over 50% is elected, otherwise you drop the lowest scored candidates and pass over their next choice till someone is over 50%.

Not quite Single Transferable Vote as I'm used to in the Irish system, but a rather large change if it were to arrive in the UK from the old first past the post system. There will be barely a moment before someone will start saying that such a system provides weak governments and coalitions don't work. If I hear Italy trotted out one more time ... According to the Electoral Reform Society, AV can be more disproportionate than first past the post! And for those looking for precedent, apparently Australia and Papua New Guinea use the system among others.

Will try to dig out models of the past elections under varied systems ...

New voting system?

According to ePolitix this morning Gordon Brown will offer MPs a referendum on a new voting system ...

"Gordon Brown is expected today to offer MPs a vote on a referendum to ditch the traditional first-past-the-post voting system for Westminster elections. He will deliver a speech on "the new politics" at the RSA."

Will try to follow up the RSA speech, but it is surprising to see him going back to a broken manifesto pledge from 1997!

When peer review breaks down

Very interesting piece from the BBC this morning reporting an open letter from Austin Smith and Robert Lovell-Badge apparently saying that reviewing of stem cell research is now controlled by a small number of researchers and it is stifling papers getting out (see here). The letter is on the Centre for Stem Cell Research news page here and the main text goes something like this ...

"... the standard of publications in the field is very variable. Papers that are scientifically flawed or comprise only modest technical increments often attract undue profile. At the same time publication of truly original findings may be delayed or rejected.

We suggest a simple step that would greatly improve transparency, fairness and accountability; when a paper is published, the reviews, response to reviews and associated editorial correspondence could be provided as Supplementary Information, while preserving anonymity of the referees. We note that this procedure has recently been adopted by The EMBO Journal."

Searching for the growing firms

An interesting report released by NESTA in October looks at the patterns of firm growth in the UK from 1997 to 1998 based on the newly available ONS demography database. The headline?

"High-growth companies represent only 6 per cent of all UK firms employing ten or more people, but accounted for more than half the growth in jobs. More specifically, 11,530 highgrowth firms were responsible for 1.3 million out of the increase in 2.4 million new jobs in established businesses employing ten or more people between 2005 and 2008 (54 per cent)."

Based on the work, the policy conclusions drawn are fuzzy at best. While agreeing that it is not possible to know ahead of time which companies are likely to be the high growth stars, the report says that "... whenever feasible, government funded business support should be targeted at businesses that have the potential to grow." It seems like the search for the grail - even though we know we cannot find it we should pursue it.

There are a few other problems with the approach for me. As the definition of high growth is a company that has "... an average employment growth rate exceeding 20 per cent per annum over a three-year period and with ten or more employees at the start of the period ..." it feels slightly circular to then claim that these firms are responsible for the majority of employment growth.

What is most interesting is the patterns of such high growth firms. They are spread over all sectors and over all geographies. It seems there is value everywhere.

Overall, it is good that this report has been produced, but any policy conclusions at this stage should be very carefully drawn, especially as the period of study is leading directly into the credit crisis and the recession. These may not be the patterns we'll see for the next 10 years and more.

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Where does the time go?

As ever, the universe laughs in the face of plans to write regular blog entries. But encouraged by other friends managing in the face of impossible loads to still blog relatively recently, I'm trying to fulfil an early new year resolution to drop a blog post at least once a week. Let's see how we do ...

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