In Focus: Surveying the landscape
I’m a sucker for a good survey. I also love research and informed predictions. Which is a bit strange because I tend to take the lot of it with a large pinch of salt.
What confirmed my suspicions about a lot of market intelligence not being worth the paper it is written on was The Economist’s World in 2008 Report. I used to be an avid reader of this annual glossy publication but the 2008 one, which came out in late 2007, contained the following lines from the editor in his introduction: “Two big events will frame the year ahead: America’s presidential election and the summer Olympic games in Beijing.”
Whoops. No mention about property bubbles, sub-prime mortgages, banks collapsing, governments propping up the world financial system and the start of the worst recession since the 1930s. So where was the market intelligence?
Another piece of evidence. Once again it involves The Economist - and I don’t mean to pick on what I think is a great publication. Apparently back in the 1980s it asked different groups of people to predict where the world would be in ten years’ time. When the results were analysed in the 1990s it turned out that a group of London dustmen had been far more accurate in their predictions than a group of former finance ministers.
As a business publisher we receive a lot of surveys and analysis of research and, my scepticism aside, the issue we now face is that the underlying opinions framing such data are seemingly changing on a day to day basis.
The uncertain times we are living in means that business confidence is oscillating wildly between gloriously optimistic and painfully pessimistic depending on what was in the news that morning and the latest set of business figures. The macro and the micro is both playing a part here as companies are taking a forensic look at their own circumstances and then putting this in the context of cuts, recessionary talk and a consumer confidence. Good one day, bad the next.
An interesting piece of research from accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers earlier this week predicted a wealth of new jobs will be created in the Midlands next year (with the caveat that skills shortages will create challenges).
Robert Wigley-Jones, human resource services partner at PwC in the Midlands, said: “The expected headcount increases are encouraging news for the Midlands job market and suggests the private sector will be able to accommodate those public sector workers who are made redundant.”
I certainly agree with the first part of what Robert says but the second part of his comment depends, as he hints, on these projections becoming reality. And for that to happen the circumstances next year have to be the same or similar as they were when the respondents answered the PwC survey. My view is that they won’t be and that, whilst it is always useful to take the temperature of business confidence in this way, as a meaningful prediction of where the economy is going, it is perhaps less useful.
As we approach the end of the year there is still a huge amount of uncertainty in the region economy (reflecting the wider UK economy) and I think things could go either way next year. And that non-prediction is the only one you’ll get out of me.
Comments? Andy Coyne, Insider
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