IF YOU look at the seasonal bustle around Church Street and Liverpool One, and all the queues of traffic forming at city centre car parks, you could be forgiven for doubting the validity of all the economic doom and gloom that the official statistics portray.
Yet the fact is the retail sector has been very badly affected by the current economic slowdown. Consumers are holding back on their Christmas spending as they seek to carefully conserve their resources due to the uncertain jobs market.
The outlook for the jobs market in the UK formed the subject of an intriguing report compiled by recruitment agency Manpower. The agency’s quarterly survey found that employers in the North West were the most pessimistic about their recruitment intentions next year.
Indeed, the survey found an unexpected East-West split affecting England, and Manpower said that a line could be drawn down the centre of the country from the Scottish border to the South coast. Employers to the west of the line were pessimistic, while those to the east were optimistic.
Manpower was unable to provide any insight into why this should be so. Clearly, we would expect the most optimistic region to be the South East, but why should the North East be more optimistic than the North West?
Another East-West split emerged last week, this time on a global scale. The economists at Standard Chartered Bank predict that the eurozone crisis will subdue global economic growth during the first half of 2012. However, they believe China and Asia generally will pick up strongly in the second half of 2012, causing the rest of the world, including the US and Europe, to show some fresh signs of life. Fingers crossed the bank’s economists are right about this.
I WASN’T altogether surprised to hear about Merseytravel chief executive Neil Scales’s decision to emigrate to Brisbane, where he will take up a top job at the city’s transport authority.
Such a move makes good sense, and not just because the weather is much better and the pay much higher.
Brisbane, Queensland and many other places “Down Under” have not suffered from the same economic woes as Europe and America. The city’s proximity to booming Asian markets – and the wealth of Australia’s mineral resources that fuel that boom – has contributed to continuous economic growth.
Brisbane’s optimism is such that, in contrast to the Manpower survey alluded to above, employers there expect to continue recruiting, so much so there is, in fact, a severe skills shortage. Australia’s doors remain open to anybody with skills who would like to move there.
Mr Scales said yesterday that the offer from Brisbane was too good to turn down. Undoubtedly this was true. It will have been a good offer. But I also wonder whether psychology played a role.
Western Europe is an extremely gloomy place at the moment, making it all the easier to jump ship if a good offer comes along from “Down Under”.
I can’t really comment about Brisbane’s local politics, because I don’t know the first thing about it. What I do know is that many people see Merseyside as a frustrating place, with lots of narrow interests getting in the way of the bigger picture.
Mr Scales experienced this frustration first- hand when he tried to build a tram network in Liverpool. There again, after 15 years in the job, perhaps he just felt it was time to have some fun in the sunshine.
