CRESC Report for FSB Wales - WHAT WALES COULD BE

Thus the second chapter highlights the problem of the missing Welsh Mittelstand or the relatively limited number of small and medium firms employing 10 to 250; the third chapter explores the difficulties of using procurement as a tool for local economic development; while chapter four highlights how the behaviour of the supermarkets creates problems for processors as well as farmers and how financ. [...] Within the workforce, deregulation of the labour market has undermined the bargaining position of many workers, so that, if the per capita (average) income gap was closed, it would not benefit the wages of the bottom 20 to 40% of working households because the majority of gains would be captured by those in the upper half of the income distribution. [...] The population of Wales has actually increased by some 10% from 2.8 to 3.1 million in the 25 years of difficulty since 1989.32 The contrast between the 1930s and the 2010s is striking because, in the depressed 1930s, some 400,000 left Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, mainly for the Midlands and South East.33 The difference between the two periods tells us much about how changes to labour and housing m. [...] In the run up to the referendum, the key programmatic SNP economic policy document was Reindustrialising Scotland, which stated on its first page the new, post-2008 objective of ‘rebalancing and reindustrialising the Scottish economy.’47 By way of contrast, in Wales, old style policies based on improving the quality of the factors of production through skills, finance and infrastructure still pred. [...] CRESC | Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change 27 WHAT WALES COULD BE Given the way these industries are currently constituted, we need to ask: what kind of firms and behaviours should the WG be trying to encourage? In terms of policy levers, the issue becomes how do we change the environment so that the WG encourages some kinds of firms and alters the behaviour of others? The starting point.