Oho! Look! The mechanical hero has spoken! Anyone who says to align the valve with the brand is objectively wrong! My homie Calvin has decreed it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eqR6nlZNeU8
PS I met #CalvinJones and HE asked for MY autograph! He's so cool!
1. C Bear.
It's like poetry, it rhymes.
2. My boss said I did a really good job on the bar tape yesterday! I studied from my homie #CalvinJones (did I tell you I've spoken to him? In person? I have, you know.).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5MzIiv7pewE
I had my notes and screenshots all in my book this time (that Calvin signed).
So my studying paid off!
3. I got a £20 tip from a customer for PDI'ing their bikes.
Just a reminder that I've met #CalvinJones and HE asked ME for my autograph! Did I tell you I met Calvin Jones? I did. I met him!
For those who don't know what this is about, or wonder why you can't fit one that's close enough, my homie, #CalvinJones (HE asked for MY autograph!) explains;
#CalvinJones is such a cool guy! He's so chill and friendly! He makes YOU feel like the celeb!
I met #CalvinJones today! He's so super nice!
#CalvinJones #ParkTool #bikemekanik
I wonder if I'll get to meet him at the bike show!
Afallen yn 6 🎂
Eleni comisiynodd Afallen yr Athro Calvin Jones i ysgrifennu cyfres o bedwar blogbost am economi Cymru. Dathlwyd cyhoeddi’r pedwerydd blog, a’r olaf, ar benblwydd Afallen yn 6 oed ym mis Tachwedd, gyda sgwrs o flaen 40 o westeion yng Nghlwb y Bont ym Mhontypridd.
Ein werthoedd
Un o brif amcanion Afallen yw cadw arian a sgiliau yng Nghymru.
Wrth gwrs, ni allwn wneud hynny ar ein pennau ein hunain! Mae ein holl weithgareddau yn digwydd o fewn cyd-destun polisi, boed yn lleol, rhanbarthol, cenedlaethol neu drwy Gyflwr Unedol y DU.
Mae gweithio o fewn y fframwaith hwnnw yn dal i’n galluogi i gyfrannu mewn ffordd ryfeddol. Mae bron ein holl wariant – ac eithrio ein costau yswiriant a TG – yn parhau o fewn Cymru, ymhell dros 95% o’n holl incwm.
Rydym hefyd yn rhoi 10% o’n helw net i achosion da, ac yn buddsoddi 10% ychwanegol yn y sector ynni cymunedol yng Nghymru. Hyd yn hyn, mae hynny wedi cynhyrchu miloedd o bunnoedd o fuddsoddiad a rhoddion, gan ein helpu i ddangos ein bod yn ymarfer yn union yr hyn yr ydym yn ei hyrwyddo.
Fodd bynnag, rydym yn ddiamynedd ac yn awyddus i weld newid mwy cyflym ac eang ledled Cymru (a thu hwnt). Dyna pam yr oeddem wrth ein bodd yn gweithio gydag un o economegwyr mwyaf uchel ei barch a di-flewyn-ar-dafod Cymru, yr Athro Calvin Jones, ar gyfres o bedwar post blog sy’n herio meddwl confensiynol ac yn pwyntio at wahanol ffyrdd o wneud pethau.
Yn y gyfres honno o bostiadau blog, mae Calvin yn amlygu rhesymau strwythurol dros dlodi Cymru, ac yn gofyn cwestiynau treiddgar ynghylch a ydym yn dilyn y llwybr cywir – neu hyd yn oed a yw twf economaidd confensiynol hyd yn oed yn ddymunol.
Ac ar 13 Tachwedd 2024, daeth deugain o wahoddedigion ynghyd ar gyfer noson o her, trafod a rhwydweithio mewn Clwb y Bont llawn dop ym Mhontypridd.
Wedi’i danio gan fwyd a ddarparwyd gan fenter gymdeithasol leol, Stiwdio 37, a gan ddiodydd meddal neu seidr lleol dewisol (Gwynt y Ddraig), roedd sgwrs Calvin yn wych (gweler isod am ragflas byr iawn o’r sgwrs), a’r cwestiynau wedyn darparu deunydd trafod ardderchog i bawb a oedd yn bresennol.
Y cwestiwn i ni yw; beth fydd yn newid o ganlyniad?
Rydym yn awyddus i weithio gydag unrhyw unigolyn neu sefydliad yng Nghymru sydd â lefelau tebyg o ddiffyg amynedd (!), egni ac ymrwymiad i wella’r canlyniadau i Gymru. Rydym yn gweithio ar y cyd, ac yn defnyddio ein profiad a’n sgil sylweddol mewn rheoli prosiectau i sicrhau canlyniadau rhagorol.
Os oes gennych ddiddordeb mewn gweithio gyda ni, cysylltwch ag unrhyw un o’r Partneriaid. Mae gan Gymru lawer o syniadau rhyfeddol, a gall gyflawni pethau rhyfeddol pan fyddwn yn gweithio ar y cyd tuag at nodau cyffredin cyfiawnder cymdeithasol, gweithredu hinsawdd, a lleoliaeth 🤝❤️🏴
Stone by stone: Deconstructing and rebuilding innovation in Wales
The last guest post in the series of four by Professor Calvin Jones about the Welsh economy describes how innovation has developed before and after devolution. You can read his first three posts in the series:
Header photo: courtesy of William Warby
“In the war against the Welsh, one of the men of arms was struck by an arrow shot at him by a Welshman. It went right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected … by his iron chausses, and then through the skirt of his leather tunic. Next it penetrated the … saddle … and finally it lodged in his horse, driving so deep that it killed the animal”
Gerald of Wales, 1188
The Welsh … appear to have been the first to develop the tactical use of the longbow into the deadliest weapon of its day. During the Anglo-Norman invasion of Wales, it is said that the ‘Welsh bowmen took a heavy toll on the invaders’. With the conquest of Wales complete, Welsh conscripts were incorporated into the English army for Edward’s campaigns further north into Scotland.
Castelow, 2016
It didn’t stop in Scotland of course. Not much does. In the Hundred Years’ war between England and France, across the battles of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, English and Welsh longbowmen killed perhaps 20,000 soldiers, thousands of knights and half a dozen or so princes for handfuls of their own losses. Indeed, England’s soldiers were more likely to die from dysentery than the poke of a French lance. Only the arrival of gunpowder displaced the bow as the ultimate leveller between rich and poor.
The Welsh didn’t invent the longbow. They took a stone age tool, improved it, and developed new techno-social structures – in what then passed for the military – to maximise its impact. Then the English came along, took it and supercharged it, in ways that were impossible for the Welsh. Not only were English kings able to integrate archers into a fully-featured military machine, and move that machine to continental Europe, but they were, at their best, able to coordinate financial and human resources, and modify behaviours across the entire ecosystem of medieval England to deliver an effective fighting force where and when needed. Edward Longshanks banned all Sunday sports across England apart from archery to ensure relevant skills were widespread and sharp, and as late as 1508 England banned the low-skill-required crossbow to ensure the longbow remained sovereign.
The Welsh king couldn’t do that. Hell, he didn’t even exist. The integration of the longbow into medieval warfare might have sent quite a few Anglo-Normans (and some of their horses) to an early grave, and even extended the independence of a few Welsh princedoms for a few years longer… but in the long term it made no difference at all. Why? Because Innovation, in its origins, and its place, and in its application and its benefits, is inherently contextual. And our context stinks.
Wales innovates (not)
Wales struggles with innovation – at least as commonly understood. Per capita spending on research, development & innovation is the lowest in the UK. Sectors, from farming through manufacturing to services, underperform in terms of capital investment, R&D and sheer dynamism. Higher education and public R&D pull up no trees. And none of this is new. Our industrial legacy is a raft of firms that are mostly either tiny, or large multinational facilities focussed on production or resource extraction – neither foregrounding innovation. The UK Government shovels science spending into the Golden Triangle. And government itself has become – in the UK and Wales by extension – a machine for allocating money, rather than bodies that actually domuch of anything. Our levels of qualifications and skills – an important driver of innovation – are poor.
Innovation is increasingly important for two reasons though: Firstly, it was earmarked by Vaughan Gething when Economy Cabinet Secretary as critical to the delivery on Wales’ national objectives in a strategy that sought to include public and civic bodies in the innovation landscape via a ‘missions’ approach. Secondly, at the other end of the M4 but still with a missions framing, Labour has focussed on economic growth in a way that makes a step-change in UK innovation performance, and hence productivity, central.
Both these approaches have limitations. In Wales, nothing is said about the changes to structures, incentives or funding that might actually encourage wider innovation. In London, there is (yet) little thought about how innovation and economic growth will make people’s lives better, beyond the obvious (but untrue) equivalence of increased economic growth and tax take with increased public spending. Innovation is, across much of the public and academic realm, posited as an unquestioned good. It isn’t.
Everything everywhere all at once? Really?
Last month two Harvard students described how they used a pair of unobtrusive Meta Ray Ban smart glasses to take photos of strangers’ faces, which were then automatically linked to an invasive face recognition database. Whereupon an LLM cross referenced with a variety of people-search databases to deliver intelligence on that person, including their name, address, and interests. The students even approached strangers and pretended to know them based on the information they had gleaned.
Innovative, no?
We have been trained to blithely think of innovation as positive and desirable. Which is a hard sell if you’re a Tesco cashier that’s just lost their job to a crappier, less chatty but cheaper self-swipe till. Successful innovation does not mean successful places. If you need convincing, just count the number of homeless people across Silicon Valley, or look at the backers of the 47th President of the USA. Or consider being a single female on a late train home as some creep stares at you through a pair of Zuckerberg’s latest AI toy.
Closer to home, we need to worry about how far R&D and innovation address the key issues we face, even if we do capture a decent proportion of innovation-related economic activity. Newport’s semiconductor cluster supports almost £400m of GVA, and 2,600 jobs, but Newport remains… well, Newport. It will take a lot of work to make an improved innovation performance touch the sides of Wales’ economic wellbeing needs, especially when innovation is clustered in the relatively wealthy (and urban) parts of the region, and liable to attracting labour from a lot further afield than Merthyr or Llandysul. And there is a risk that a focus on innovation – or at least innovation in pursuit of innovation for growth – risks further dilution of an economic narrative that already includes the foundational economy, the wellbeing economy, the circular economy, and a global-value-chain-climbing manufacturing action plan. Some of these are innovation friendly, or innovation-adjacent, but how is an open question.
We should also not forget that innovation is not costless. It requires organisations to divert staff, money and time away from the day-to-day to understand how to get there from here and start plotting a path. Immediate performance suffers for the long term good. This is hard. Not least for example in an NHS which was built for times when lives were shorter, and medicine simpler so now struggles… but wherein no-one has yet diverted sufficient resource into the obvious solution: preventative rather than ameliorative care, alongside of course a radically changed public health policy. Meanwhile, innovation challenges the value (and existence) of products, services and processes in organisations… and hence of the people in charge of the soon-to-be-obsolete bits. Those who have succeeded by clawing to the top of a particularly shaped organogram might not be overjoyed at the prospect of suddenly losing budget to – or heaven forbid reporting to – that weird nerd from the back cubicle who has written a whizz bang piece of code. Much easier just to… quietly lose the new ideas.
And of course, with innovation there is risk. We all know that Wales is more dependent on public sector employment and activity (and that in the closely associated third sector) than most regions. This is then a higher proportion of employees who will not – cannot – be rewarded for innovative thoughts with bonuses or promotions, but where the risk of getting it wrong is significant. who work in organisations where the watchwords are stewardship, safety, and spending public money wisely. Places where success then largely means getting the money out the door into safe hands by March 31st. The clearest example of this tension was perhaps when the regional development bank was given the extremely tough task of both encouraging growth and innovation in inherently risky firms, and turning a buck.
The future has been here forever
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can’t really do innovation, but our technocratic, linear notion of invention, innovation and technological time ignores reality, and ignores the fact that really, honestly, there’s already enough stuff out there. Raise your eyes from this screen a sec and look at the surrounding office/living room/pub/park bench/factory floor/S&M dungeon. How much of what you see and use was invented in Wales? Yep, nowt. So why do we spend swathes of time worrying about what we invent and innovate here, but (almost) none purposefully and systematically searching the world for cool new stuff – technical and social – that we could be adopting or adapting? When transformative innovations do arise, we adopt them by the force of multinational economic logic, not proactive public policy.
Take climate change. We are busy developing sophisticated regulation mechanisms to enable the roll out of marine renewables that are decades away from commercial viability, and looking forward to welcoming, um, community-scale nuclear, whilst failing to quickly roll out onshore wind and solar technologies that are already grid-competitive, in part because we understandably can’t get over the thought of disrupting our untouched rural landscape, dense with ancient broadleaf forests and teeming with lynx and aurochs; reverberating to the cries of white tailed eagles wheeling over the salmon-packed rivers [checks notes. throws notes in bin].
Love Treorchy? Want to see it thrive? There’s a cool little app for that. Want to create more Treorchys by, I dunno, the policy innovation of levelling the playing field a bit by taxing out-of-town shopping centre car parks? Nah.
Ask not what you can do for innovation, but what innovation can do for you
Innovation is, and will always be, difficult for Wales. It requires spare capital – human, financial, political, and organisational, capacity we simply don’t have. Where innovation does occur locally, it is – by virtue of our small, peripheral and boring economy, and lack of industrial diversity and economic ownership – unlikely to be applied locally. Thus we need to reverse the logic of the innovation question. Not to encourage it for the sake of, but take a good, hard look at where we are going and what’s needed to get there. Then we need to understand whether the technology, policy, or approach already exists somewhere, and whether we can obtain and apply it here in Wales. Only after this process will we be left with an ‘innovative gap’ that we might need to fill locally.
One obvious and important example: it’s a decent bet that within a decade, nobody will be dangerously obese in Wales. We will have taken huge strides towards our goal of a (physically) healthier Wales. This will happen because of GLP-1 and related drugs that were very much not invented here. The policy question is then clearly, not how Wales invents new drugs, but how we access these new tools in ways that are affordable for the entirety of a patient’s life. And how we ensure that the newly svelte population don’t just sit on the couch, but are encouraged use their improved mobility to engage in activities that improve the muscle mass, physical resilience and mental health that the drugs might leave unchanged. That is, we need to ask how we harness innovations to drive wider wellbeing.
We will of course at some points have to invent stuff. Let me again give you example.
I make no apologies for repeating myself. We need an education system that is forward-focussed. That teaches kids andgrownups how to learn. That creates a workforce – and citizens – fit for the future. We started on this a decade or so ago, but never followed through with a radical reassessment of qualification structures or the transition to tertiary education, meaning teachers can (and from family experience, do) teach to the exam and place a tight rein how kids gallop into courseworks). We are then left to worry about slipping down PISA rankings in maths and English in a world where AI is already acing the rules-based mathematics taught in schools and college, and moving on to proving theorems. A world where, somewhat depressingly, I can, no longer distinguish between a coursework written by a very good Master’s student, and one written by Chat-GPT. Taxi for Professor Jones please.
In Wales we control every bit of the education elephant, from the nursery trunk to the tiny adult tail. And what have we done to change this system, to prepare our people for a massively changed and challenged future? As my daughter sits in her Year 7 history class, learning about 1066-and-all-that; as my eldest did in 2017; as I did in 1982, I can only conclude the answer is… Nothing much.
If government can’t innovate, how can we expect anyone else to?
Conclusion
The new UK Government’s core focus on economic growth will, within the enduring institutional logic of UK government which always trumps party, see more focus on sectors, clusters, ‘high value’ activities, investment and exports. This inherently economic-competitive framing will create tensions with the (prior) Welsh Government approach that saw economic activity and innovation as part of a much wider system. Labour in Cardiff Bay might congratulate itself on coming to the ‘missions’ approach earlier than its UK HQ, but this a double-edged sword. The mission approach (as popularised) emphasises ambition, inspiration and boldness; high levels and big themes. It requires dynamic adaptability, and the deconstruction of silos to bring cross sector, discipline and learning. Systematic and cross cutting policy, consistency over time, and substantive community engagement. Vision. Headroom.
These are, unfortunately, all things that Welsh Governments have struggled with. In their absence, the notional adoption of mission-based innovation risks an ever-larger implementation gap, and a future full of even more strategies full of even more lovely case studies that are full of sound and fury; signifying nothing because levers of traditional innovation simply aren’t here, or can’t be pulled.
The alternative is (in theory) simple. Work out what kind of Wales we want and radically reshape our public policies to suit. Work out what approaches and technologies we need, and beg steal or borrow what we can – from wherever they are. Make sure best practice spreads. Then ask. What doesn’t exist that we need?
Only then should we look to bring new stuff into a world already collapsing under the weight of it.
#CalvinJones #Cymru #Economics #Innovation #Prosperity #Wales
Carreg wrth garreg: Dadadeiladu ac ailadeiladu arloesedd yng Nghymru
Mae’r post gwadd olaf yn y gyfres o bedwar gan yr Athro Calvin Jones am economi Cymru yn disgrifio sut mae arloesi wedi datblygu cyn ac ar ôl datganoli. Gallwch ddarllen ei dri post cyntaf yn y gyfres:
Llun gan William Warby
“In the war against the Welsh, one of the men of arms was struck by an arrow shot at him by a Welshman. It went right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected … by his iron chausses, and then through the skirt of his leather tunic. Next it penetrated the … saddle … and finally it lodged in his horse, driving so deep that it killed the animal”
Gerald of Wales, 1188
The Welsh … appear to have been the first to develop the tactical use of the longbow into the deadliest weapon of its day. During the Anglo-Norman invasion of Wales, it is said that the ‘Welsh bowmen took a heavy toll on the invaders’. With the conquest of Wales complete, Welsh conscripts were incorporated into the English army for Edward’s campaigns further north into Scotland.
Castelow, 2016
Ni ddaeth i ben yn yr Alban wrth gwrs. Nid oes llawer yn gwneud. Yn y rhyfel Can Mlynedd rhwng Lloegr a Ffrainc, ar draws brwydrau Crecy, Poitiers ac Agincourt, lladdodd gwyr bwa hir o Loegr a Chymru efallai 20,000 o filwyr, miloedd o farchogion a rhyw hanner dwsin o dywysogion am lond llaw o’u colledion eu hunain. Yn wir, roedd milwyr Lloegr yn fwy tebygol o farw o ddysentri nag o broc ar lanhawr Ffrengig. Dim ond dyfodiad powdwr gwn a ddadleolir y bwa fel y lefelwr eithaf rhwng y cyfoethog a’r tlawd.
Nid y Cymry a ddyfeisiodd y bwa hir. Fe wnaethon nhw gymryd teclyn oes y cerrig, ei wella, a datblygu strwythurau techno-gymdeithasol newydd – yn yr hyn a basiodd ar y pryd i’r fyddin – i wneud y mwyaf o’i effaith. Yna daeth y Saeson ymlaen, ei chymeryd a’i uwch-lenwi, mewn ffyrdd a oedd yn amhosibl i’r Cymry. Nid yn unig roedd brenhinoedd Lloegr yn gallu integreiddio saethwyr i mewn i beiriant milwrol llawn sylw, a symud y peiriant hwnnw i gyfandir Ewrop, ond roedden nhw, ar eu gorau, yn gallu cydlynu adnoddau ariannol a dynol, ac addasu ymddygiadau ar draws holl ecosystem yr oesoedd canol. Lloegr i ddarparu llu ymladd effeithiol lle a phan fo angen. Gwaharddodd Edward Longshanks bob chwaraeon ar y Sul ar draws Lloegr ar wahân i saethyddiaeth i sicrhau bod sgiliau perthnasol yn eang ac yn finiog, a mor hwyr â 1508 gwaharddodd Lloegr y bwa croes gofynnol sgil-isel i sicrhau bod y bwa hir yn aros yn sofran.
Ni allai brenin Cymru wneud hynny. Uffern, nid oedd hyd yn oed yn bodoli. Mae’n bosibl bod integreiddio’r bwa hir â rhyfela canoloesol wedi anfon cryn dipyn o Eingl-Normaniaid (a rhai o’u ceffylau) i fedd cynnar, a hyd yn oed wedi ymestyn annibyniaeth ambell dywysogaeth Gymreig am rai blynyddoedd yn hirach… ond yn y tymor hir ni wnaeth unrhyw wahaniaeth o gwbl. Pam? Gan fod Arloesedd, yn ei wreiddiau, a’i le, ac yn ei gymhwysiad a’i fanteision, yn gynhenid yn gyd-destunol. Ac mae ein cyd-destun yn drewi.
Cymru yn arloesi (ddim)
Mae Cymru’n cael trafferth gydag arloesi – o leiaf yr un mor gyffredin â deallir hynny. Gwariant y pen ar ymchwil, datblygu ac arloesi yw’r isaf yn y DU. Mae sectorau, o ffermio trwy weithgynhyrchu i wasanaethau, yn tanberfformio o ran buddsoddiad cyfalaf, ymchwil a datblygu a dynamism llwyr. Nid yw addysg uwch ac Ymchwil a Datblygu cyhoeddus yn tynnu unrhyw goed i fyny. Nid oes dim o hyn yn newydd. Mae ein hetifeddiaeth ddiwydiannol yn llu o gwmnïau sydd naill ai’n fach gan amlaf, neu’n gyfleusterau rhyngwladol mawr sy’n canolbwyntio ar gynhyrchu neu echdynnu adnoddau – nac yn blaenori arloesedd. Mae Llywodraeth y DU yn taflu gwariant gwyddoniaeth i’r Triongl Aur. Ac mae’r llywodraeth ei hun wedi dod – yn y DU a Chymru drwy estyniad – peiriant ar gyfer dyrannu arian, yn hytrach na chyrff sydd mewn gwirionedd yn gwneud llawer o unrhyw beth. Mae ein lefelau cymwysterau a’n sgiliau – sy’n sbardun pwysig i arloesi – yn wael.
Mae arloesi yn gynyddol bwysig am ddau reswm: Yn gyntaf, cafodd ei glustnodi gan Vaughan Gething pan oedd Ysgrifennydd Cabinet yr Economi yn hanfodol i gyflawni amcanion cenedlaethol Cymru mewn strategaeth a oedd yn ceisio cynnwys cyrff cyhoeddus a dinesig yn y dirwedd arloesi trwy ddull ‘cenhadaeth’. Yn ail, ar ben arall yr M4 ond yn dal gyda fframio cenadaethau, mae Llafur wedi canolbwyntio ar dwf economaidd mewn ffordd sy’n gwneud newid sylweddol ym mherfformiad arloesedd y DU, ac felly cynhyrchiant, canolog.
Mae gan y ddau ddull hyn gyfyngiadau. Yng Nghymru, ni ddywedir unrhyw beth am y newidiadau i strwythurau, cymhellion neu gyllid a allai annog arloesedd ehangach mewn gwirionedd. Yn Llundain, nid oes fawr o feddwl am sut y bydd arloesi a thwf economaidd yn gwneud bywydau pobl yn well, y tu hwnt i gywerthedd amlwg (ond anwir) cynnydd mewn twf economaidd a threth gyda gwariant cyhoeddus cynyddol. Mae arloesi, ar draws llawer o’r byd cyhoeddus ac academaidd, yn cael ei ystyried yn dda heb ei gwestiynu. Nid yw.
Popeth ym mhobman i gyd ar unwaith? Reit?
Y mis diwethaf disgrifiodd dau fyfyriwr o Harvard sut y gwnaethant ddefnyddio pâr o sbectol smart Meta Ray Ban anymwthiol i dynnu lluniau o wynebau dieithriaid, a oedd wedyn yn cael eu cysylltu’n awtomatig â chronfa ddata adnabod wynebau ymledol. Gyda hynny, croesgyfeiriodd LLM ag amrywiaeth o gronfeydd data chwilio pobl i gyflwyno gwybodaeth am y person hwnnw, gan gynnwys ei enw, cyfeiriad a diddordebau. Roedd y myfyrwyr hyd yn oed yn mynd at ddieithriaid ac yn cymryd arnynt eu bod yn eu hadnabod yn seiliedig ar y wybodaeth yr oeddent wedi’i chasglu.
Arloesol, nac ydy?
Rydym wedi cael ein hyfforddi i feddwl yn ddiflas am arloesi fel rhywbeth cadarnhaol a dymuno l. Sy’n werthiant caled os ydych chi’n ariannwr Tesco sydd newydd golli ei swydd i dilledyn crapier, llai siaradus ond til hunan-swipe rhatach. Nid yw arloesi llwyddiannus yn golygu lleoedd llwyddiannus. Os oes angen argyhoeddiad arnoch, cyfrwch nifer y bobl ddigartref ar draws Silicon Valley, neu edrychwch ar gefnogwyr 47ain Arlywydd UDA. Neu ystyriwch fod yn fenyw sengl ar drên hwyr adref wrth i rai ymgripiad syllu arnoch chi trwy bâr o degan AI diweddaraf Zuckerberg.
Yn nes adref, mae angen inni boeni i ba raddau y mae ymchwil a datblygu ac arloesi yn mynd i’r afael â’r materion allweddol sy’n ein hwynebu, hyd yn oed os ydym yn dal cyfran dda o weithgarwch economaidd sy’n ymwneud ag arloesi. Mae clwstwr lled-ddargludyddion Casnewydd yn cefnogi bron i £400m o GYC, a 2,600 o swyddi, ond mae Casnewydd yn parhau… wel, Casnewydd. Bydd angen llawer o waith i wneud i berfformiad arloesi gwell gyffwrdd ag ochrau anghenion llesiant economaidd Cymru, yn enwedig pan fo arloesedd wedi’i glystyru yn rhannau cymharol gyfoethog (a threfol) y rhanbarth, ac yn agored i ddenu llafur o lawer ymhellach. i ffwrdd na Merthyr na Llandysul. Ac mae perygl y bydd ffocws ar arloesi – neu o leiaf arloesi wrth fynd ar drywydd arloesi ar gyfer twf – yn peryglu gwanhau ymhellach naratif economaidd sydd eisoes yn cynnwys yr economi sylfaenol, yr economi llesiant, yr economi gylchol, a gwerth byd-eang- cynllun gweithredu gweithgynhyrchu dringo cadwyn. Mae rhai o’r rhain yn gyfeillgar i arloesi, neu’n gyfochrog ag arloesi, ond sut mae’n gwestiwn agored.
Ni ddylem hefyd anghofio nad yw arloesi yn ddi-werth. Mae’n ei gwneud yn ofynnol i sefydliadau ddargyfeirio staff, arian ac amser i ffwrdd o’r dydd i ddydd i ddeall sut i gyrraedd yno o’r fan hon a dechrau plotio llwybr. Mae perfformiad ar unwaith yn dioddef er lles hirdymor. Mae hyn yn anodd. Yn anad dim, er enghraifft, mewn GIG a adeiladwyd ar gyfer adegau pan oedd bywydau’n fyrrach, a meddygaeth yn symlach, felly nawr mae’n cael trafferth… Ond lle nad oes neb eto wedi dargyfeirio digon o adnoddau i’r ateb amlwg: gofal ataliol yn hytrach nag ymhelaethu, ochr yn ochr â pholisi iechyd cyhoeddus sydd wedi newid yn sylweddol. Yn y cyfamser, mae arloesedd yn herio gwerth (a bodolaeth) cynhyrchion, gwasanaethau a phrosesau mewn sefydliadau… ac felly’r bobl sy’n gyfrifol am y darnau darfodedig cyn bo hir. Efallai na fydd y rhai sydd wedi llwyddo trwy glapio i frig organogram siâp arbennig yn gorfoleddu gyda’r gobaith o golli cyllideb yn sydyn i – neu’r nefoedd yn gwahardd adrodd i – y nerd rhyfedd hwnnw o’r ciwbicl cefn sydd wedi ysgrifennu darn o god bang chwis. Mae’n haws dim ond … Colli syniadau newydd yn dawel.
Ac wrth gwrs, gydag arloesedd mae yna risg. Rydym i gyd yn gwybod bod Cymru’n fwy dibynnol ar gyflogaeth a gweithgarwch y sector cyhoeddus (a hynny yn y trydydd sector sydd â chysylltiad agos) na’r rhan fwyaf o ranbarthau. Mae hyn wedyn yn gyfran uwch o weithwyr na fydd yn – yn gallu cael eu gwobrwyo am feddyliau arloesol gyda bonysau neu hyrwyddiadau, ond lle mae’r risg o’i gael yn anghywir yn sylweddol. sy’n gweithio mewn sefydliadau lle mae’r watchwords yn stiwardiaeth, diogelwch, ac yn gwario arian cyhoeddus yn ddoeth. Lleoedd lle mae llwyddiant wedyn yn golygu cael yr arian allan o’r drws i ddwylo diogel erbyn Mawrth 31ain. Efallai mai’r enghraifft gliriaf o’r tensiwn hwn oedd pan roddwyd y banc datblygu rhanbarthol y dasg anodd dros ben o annog twf ac arloesedd mewn cwmnïau cynhenid mewn perygl, a throi bwch.
Mae’r dyfodol wedi bod yma am byth
Nid oes rhaid iddo fod fel hyn. Ni allwn arloesi mewn gwirionedd, ond mae ein syniad technocrataidd, llinol o ddyfeisio, arloesi ac amser technolegol yn anwybyddu realiti, ac yn anwybyddu’r ffaith, a dweud y gwir, bod digon o bethau ar gael yn barod. Codwch eich llygaid o’r sgrin hon eiliad ac edrychwch ar y swyddfa/ystafell fyw/tafarn/mainc parc/llawr y ffatri/dungeon S&M o’ch cwmpas. Faint o’r hyn yr ydych yn ei weld ac yn ei ddefnyddio a ddyfeisiwyd yng Nghymru? Ie, nawr. Felly pam rydyn ni’n treulio llawer o amser yn poeni am yr hyn rydyn ni’n ei ddyfeisio a’i arloesi yma, ond (bron) dim yn chwilio’r byd yn bwrpasol ac yn systematig am bethau newydd cŵl – technegol a chymdeithasol – y gallem ni fod yn eu mabwysiadu neu’n eu haddasu? Pan fydd arloesiadau trawsnewidiol yn codi, rydym yn eu mabwysiadu trwy rym rhesymeg economaidd amlwladol, nid polisi cyhoeddus rhagweithiol.
Cymerwch newid hinsawdd. Rydym yn brysur yn datblygu mecanweithiau rheoleiddio soffistigedig i alluogi’r broses o gyflwyno ynni adnewyddadwy morol sydd ddegawdau i ffwrdd o hyfywedd masnachol, ac yn edrych ymlaen at groesawu, um, niwclear ar raddfa gymunedol, tra’n methu â chyflwyno technolegau gwynt a solar ar y tir yn gyflym sydd eisoes yn bodoli. yn gystadleuol o ran grid, yn rhannol oherwydd, yn ddealladwy, ni allwn ddod dros y syniad o darfu ar ein tirwedd wledig ddigyffwrdd, yn drwchus gyda choedwigoedd llydanddail hynafol ac yn gyforiog o lyncs a auroch; yn atseinio i waedd yr eryr cynffon wen yn gwibio dros yr afonydd llawn eog [nodiadau siec. yn taflu nodiadau yn y bin].
Caru Treorci? Eisiau ei weld yn ffynnu? Mae yna app bach cŵl ar gyfer hynny. Eisiau creu mwy o Dreorci drwy, nid wyf yn gwybod, yr arloesi polisi o lefelu’r cae chwarae ychydig drwy drethu meysydd parcio canolfannau siopa y tu allan i’r dref? Nah.
Gofynnwch nid beth allwch chi ei wneud ar gyfer arloesi, ond beth all arloesi ei wneud i chi
Mae arloesi yn anodd i Gymru, a bydd bob amser yn anodd. Mae angen cyfalaf sbâr – gallu dynol, ariannol, gwleidyddol a threfniadol, nad oes gennym ni. Lle mae arloesi’n digwydd yn lleol, mae’n annhebygol – oherwydd ein heconomi fach, ymylol a diflas, a diffyg amrywiaeth ddiwydiannol a pherchnogaeth economaidd – gael ei gymhwyso’n lleol. Felly mae angen inni wrthdroi rhesymeg y cwestiwn arloesi. Nid er mwyn ei annog, ond cymerwch olwg dda, galed ar ble rydym yn mynd a beth sydd ei angen i gyrraedd yno. Yna mae angen inni ddeall a yw’r dechnoleg, y polisi, neu’r dull gweithredu eisoes yn bodoli yn rhywle, ac a allwn ei chael a’i chymhwyso yma yng Nghymru. Dim ond ar ôl y broses hon y byddwn yn cael ein gadael â ‘bwlch arloesol’ y gallai fod angen i ni ei lenwi’n lleol.
Un enghraifft amlwg a phwysig: mae’n bet weddus, ymhen degawd, na fydd neb yn beryglus o ordew yng Nghymru. Byddwn wedi cymryd camau breision tuag at ein nod o Gymru iachach (yn gorfforol). Bydd hyn yn digwydd oherwydd GLP-1 a chyffuriau cysylltiedig na chawsant eu dyfeisio yma i raddau helaeth. Y cwestiwn polisi felly yn amlwg yw, nid sut y mae Cymru yn dyfeisio cyffuriau newydd, ond sut yr ydym yn cyrchu’r offer newydd hyn mewn ffyrdd sy’n fforddiadwy am oes claf cyfan. A sut rydyn ni’n sicrhau nad yw’r boblogaeth newydd svelte yn eistedd ar y soffa yn unig, ond yn cael eu hannog i ddefnyddio eu symudedd gwell i gymryd rhan mewn gweithgareddau sy’n gwella màs cyhyr, gwydnwch corfforol ac iechyd meddwl y gallai’r cyffuriau eu gadael heb eu newid. Hynny yw, mae angen inni ofyn sut yr ydym yn harneisio arloesiadau i ysgogi lles ehangach.
Wrth gwrs bydd yn rhaid i ni ar rai adegau ddyfeisio pethau. Gadewch imi eto roi enghraifft ichi.
Nid wyf yn ymddiheuro am ailadrodd fy hun. Mae arnom angen system addysg sy’n canolbwyntio ar y dyfodol. Mae hyn yn dysgu plant ac oedolion sut i ddysgu. Mae hynny’n creu gweithlu – a dinasyddion – sy’n addas ar gyfer y dyfodol. Dechreuon ni ar hyn ddegawd neu ddwy yn ôl, ond ni wnaethom ddilyn trwy ailasesiad radical o strwythurau cymwysterau neu’r newid i addysg drydyddol, sy’n golygu y gall athrawon (ac o brofiad teuluol, gwneud) addysgu i’r arholiad a rhoi pwyslais tynn ar sut mae plant yn mynd ati i weithio ar y cwrs). Yna, gadawyd i ni boeni am lithro i lawr safleoedd PISA mewn mathemateg a Saesneg mewn byd lle mae AI eisoes yn mynd i’r afael â’r fathemateg sy’n seiliedig ar reolau a addysgir mewn ysgolion a choleg, a symud ymlaen at theoremau profi. Byd lle gallaf, braidd yn ddigalon, beidio â gwahaniaethu bellach rhwng gwaith cwrs a ysgrifennwyd gan fyfyriwr Meistr da iawn, ac un a ysgrifennwyd gan Chat-GPT. Tacsi i’r Athro Jones os gwelwch yn dda.
Yng Nghymru rydym yn rheoli pob darn o’r eliffant addysg, o’r boncyff meithrin i’r gynffon oedolion fach. A beth ydym ni wedi’i wneud i newid y system hon, i baratoi ein pobl ar gyfer dyfodol sydd wedi newid ac yn her enfawr? Gan fod fy merch yn eistedd yn ei dosbarth hanes Blwyddyn 7, gan ddysgu am 1066-a-hynny i gyd; fel y gwnaeth fy nhaid hynaf yn 2017; Fel y gwnes i yn 1982, dim ond dod i’r casgliad mai’r ateb yw … Dim byd llawer.
Os na all y llywodraeth arloesi, sut allwn ni ddisgwyl i unrhyw un arall?
Casgliad
Bydd ffocws craidd Llywodraeth newydd y DU ar dwf economaidd, o fewn rhesymeg sefydliadol barhaus llywodraeth y DU sydd bob amser yn drech na’r blaid, yn gweld mwy o ffocws ar sectorau, clystyrau, gweithgareddau ‘gwerth uchel’, buddsoddiad ac allforion. Bydd y fframio economaidd-gystadleuol hwn yn creu tensiynau gyda dull gweithredu (blaenorol) Llywodraeth Cymru a oedd yn gweld gweithgarwch economaidd ac arloesedd yn rhan o system lawer ehangach. Efallai y bydd Llafur ym Mae Caerdydd yn llongyfarch ei hun ar ddod i’r dull ‘teithiau’ yn gynharach na’i phencadlys yn y DU, ond cleddyf dau ymyl yw hwn. Mae’r ymagwedd genhadol (fel y’i poblogeiddiwyd) yn pwysleisio uchelgais, ysbrydoliaeth a beiddgarwch; lefelau uchel a themâu mawr. Mae’n gofyn am allu i addasu’n ddeinamig, a dadadeiladu seilos i ddod â dysgu traws-sector, disgyblaeth a dysgu. Polisi systematig a thrawsbynciol, cysondeb dros amser, ac ymgysylltiad cymunedol sylweddol. Gweledigaeth. uchdwr.
Mae’r rhain, yn anffodus, yn bethau y mae Llywodraethau Cymru wedi cael trafferth â nhw. Yn eu habsenoldeb, mae mabwysiadu arloesi ar sail cenhadaeth yn dybiannol yn peryglu bwlch gweithredu cynyddol, a dyfodol llawn hyd yn oed mwy o strategaethau sy’n llawn astudiaethau achos mwy hyfryd fyth sy’n llawn sain a chynddaredd; yn golygu dim oherwydd nid yw ysgogiadau arloesi traddodiadol yma, neu ni ellir eu tynnu.
Mae’r dewis arall (mewn theori) yn syml. Gweithiwch allan pa fath o Gymru yr ydym ei heisiau ac ail-lunio ein polisïau cyhoeddus yn radical i weddu iddi. Gweithiwch allan pa ddulliau a thechnolegau sydd eu hangen arnom, ac erfyniwch ddwyn neu fenthyg yr hyn a allwn – o ble bynnag y maent. Gwnewch yn siŵr bod arfer gorau yn lledaenu. Yna gofynnwch. Beth sydd ddim yn bodoli sydd ei angen arnom ni?
Dim ond wedyn y dylem geisio dod â phethau newydd i fyd sydd eisoes yn cwympo o dan bwysau.
This third guest post by Professor Calvin Jones about Wales’ economy is part of Afallen’s objective of elevating the terms of the debate in Wales about how our economy operates – and what can be done to improve it. You can read Calvin’s first blog post here, and his second post here.
Header photo: courtesy of Jim Nix.
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts.R.S. Thomas
Bloody hell Ron, lighten up mun.
On the other hand… It’s always worth having a bit of R.S. There’s something there isn’t there? As he bounced around Wales, from south to north, east to west, infused by the landscape and the people, he became able to distil and communicate, in Saesneg then Cymraeg, some of those scarce and fleet things that are universally Welsh. Things that will return the same knowing nods in Glynne Arms in Hawarden, the Ship & Castle in Aber, and the Bunch of Grapes in Ponty. We get it, we know, we’re on the edge. Done-to. A bit crap. Good natured grumblers. Stuck. One of my immigrant mates is always struck by how passive we are (her word not mine!).
Mostly, I… kinda celebrate most of this. It makes us different. In some ways perhaps even unique. Our inability to swim strongly in the mainstream opens interesting backwaters and deep pools, and incentivises us to think about life and work in ways that are more expansive, inclusive and careful. I like this because I’m at heart an optimist. But it’s not all good. Sometimes, and especially where I live, it still feels like the last day of the miners’ strike. A dead culture stamping on a human face – for ever. Port Talbot and the rural wilds have it yet to come.
You, my dear constant reader, will know my solution to this is to forget about materiality and economic prosperity, to embrace wellbeing, and modesty, and community, and each other, in some sort of degrowth-steady-state-doughnut-post-carbon-insert-hippy-buzzword economy All have a big cwtsh and shop in Oxfam for hemp notebooks instead of Apple for aluminium ones whilst preparing thoughtfully for a straightened future…
But (and bear with me here). What if I’m wrong?
I know. Tough to imagine, isn’t it? I’ll give you a minute.
If economic growth does matter – if it is the engine for climate and ecological and wellbeing transformation – then we need to think about how Wales might grow faster in terms of traditional GDP. About what economic theory and evidence tell us to do; structurally, long-term, holistically – to develop a growth orientation we have lacked for generations.
Figure 1: Gross Value Added per Capita (UK=100)
We don’t. Instead, we ‘projectify’ our economy – we imagine a freeport here, a new motorway there, some nuclear skills up top, which means even where we have a decent statement of the problems, we have a limited sense of what it might take to actually raise our GDP per head, long term, if we really went for it, to the exclusion of all else.
So. Here’s my take.
Back to Basics. What is Economic Growth?
Economic growth is what we call it when there is more stuff bought and sold in an economy of our choosing this year, rather than last year – once we ignore the effects of price inflation. That’s it. Not complicated, is it? Until you start to measure it, when you need to do tough things like collect data on all this buying and selling – of goods, services, labour – and then reallocate the value of the purchase to where it actually ends up (I’m sorry to tell you that your horrific monthly streaming bill is doing virtually nothing for Wales’ economy). You must also decide whether you care about the overall size of the economy (by measuring GDP), or more how much ‘stuff’ there is spread around your resident population (where GDP per capita is what matters).
So that’s the ‘what’. How about the how? Well, if you want a bigger economy you have to have more ‘inputs’ working together to make more outputs. These inputs include labour and capital (with the latter including physical and natural for example). In the simplest case, if the ‘level’ of an economy is determined by the contribution of these inputs, and then growth is only possible if you increase the amount of one or more inputs. For example, if female labour force participation increases, or an inward investor brings capital in the shape of a factory to a less-developed country – bingo! But you don’t always have to increase bums on seats. It has long been recognised that human capital – education, training, skills – plays an important role in increasing the contribution of each, um, bum. Literate, well-educated and well-trained workers can each contribute more. Education matters.
So far, so good. But finding more inputs is tough. Increasing labour (for example via immigration), capital, or the level of education are generally ‘one off-ish’ interventions. They certainly can’t fully account for the sustained growth we have seen in some countries for hundreds of years. Instead, economists like Josef ‘honestly, not a vampire at all’ Schumpeter suggested that economic growth is primarily due to the ‘creative destruction’ of never-ending innovation; technological change that increases the contribution of economic factors. A good example of this is that pre-internet, it could have taken you a month’s wait, a trip to the newsagent and the death of a thousand trees for my, um, wisdom, to enter your brain via your eyeballs. Yet here you are, with me economically levelling you up, straightaway on your iPhone 15 16, hungover in bed at 8.30AM. Shazam!
Yes, you may crawl to the bathroom for a tablet, don’t be long.
So the sustained economic growth that Wales needs to close the prosperity gap relies on ‘a process of continual transformation. The sort of economic progress that … would not have been possible if people had not undergone wrenching changes.’
There are then lessons here for Wales: maximise our economic inputs at work in the region (and attract more whenever we can); and spur – and embed – innovation to an extent never seen before in this small corner of the globe.
(New) Labour
The first, and most obvious thing to note is that Wales has – for generations – lagged successful (or even average) regions in the proportion of people economically active; that is, in or looking for work. This is, in terms of GDP potential, resource utterly wasted. Getting our rate of economic inactivity down from the current 28% to the UK average of 22%, and getting all those people (somehow) into work would add 115,000 people to the workforce and, even in low-pay Wales, add almost £4bn to the bottom line.
Doing that in practice is, of course… difficult. Even high post-pandemic labour demand has not done much to move the dial – because we have a problem of labour supply. People are older; sicker; perhaps disillusioned by the tales of their parents and grandparents; under-skilled; under-caring, because under-cared for… brittle relics everywhere. My esteemed colleague Rob Huggins talks, reluctantly, about a place steeped in learned helplessness. But he’s from Beddau so you can probably ignore him.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that to maximise the application of economic resources, the pro-growther must enable, persuade or force more people back to (or into) work. Coercion has been tried over the decades, usually by UK-national governments of the rightist type, and with very limited success, either during Austerity or back in the 1980s, when many in Wales could retreat into a low-cost life of family, hobbies and informal work ‘hobbles’, rather than following Norman Tebbit’s exhortations to ‘get on your bike’ and find work.
So the first and obvious thing to do here is not to scold and punish (although that might come), but to help those who already want to work but can’t. The key intervention is not in the economy, but in health and care; and not just in the Welsh NHS (or the National Disease Service as a consultant friend calls it), but holistically, in preventative public health and improving access to work through transport, skills, and better child and adult care systems. Luckily this is a rare area where our Thatcherite hawk can find common purpose with our happy-clappy Future Generation hippy. Poor health hurts everyone. As just one, awful example the legs, sight and lives lost to Type 2 diabetes in Wales represent both deeply tragic human tragedies and a waste of productive labour, as those afflicted cannot work, and as more and more resources are diverted to the job of caring for them. The half-billion-and-exploding cost to Wales is only the smallest foreshadow of the future. Even the most hard-headed economist theorist recognises that investment is a requirement for future growth. When it comes to our people and enabling infrastructures, we are doing far too little of it.
So as a start, Eluned and RT and Sir Keir give it a comradely shake and make Wales a health-creating, ‘sanitogenic’ instead of obesogenic environment. Luckily, we know some of what works. So screw taxes down (more) on sugary junk ‘til the pips (or the Coke equivalent) squeak. Restructure our town centres, employment sites and leisure hotspots to, as far as we can, force those 10,000 steps. And ban all junk-food and junky advertising and sponsorship, not just to kids (and yes, I’m looking at you gambling).
It would be nice to think that the above would go a long way to sorting Wales’ economic activity problem (and, in the case of junk food taxes generate a fair bit of cash and make us happier and healthier). But getting people into jobs is not much good if they are poor jobs. Wales has done surprisingly well since devolution in increasing the female employment rate. But any impact on GDP has been diluted by low productivity. In 1998, just before the Glorious Revolution, economic value created per hour worked in Wales was 86.6% of the UK average. In 2021 it was 84.1%.
More work needed then.
Skills to pay the bills?
Wales is under-educated, under-trained and hence under-skilled, with this especially true of the poorest parts. From an economic growth perspective, this raises so many red flags that Bulls’ ears are twitching from Lawrenny to Lixwm. Our industrial heritage is disappearing in the rear-view, leaving us with education challenges that were insoluble as pupil and adult education spending fell through Austerity, and COVID bore down hardest on the poorest. In the longer term, the huge demands that our ill-health makes on public expenditure means improving human capital is only possible if Wales gets healthier over the next decades – as it will under my sensible and modest plans above! Of more concern is understanding how education links to economic growth in any future economy – and then how we operationalise the link.
I went around many of these houses in 2019, thinking about what a fit-for-the-future school-age education system in Wales would look like. I leave you, dear reader, to peruse at leisure, but would reflect on the fact that back then I suggested abandoning GCSEs as they promoted a dominant model of ‘teaching-to-the-exam’, rote learning in narrow tramlines, and effectively threw away the formative years of ‘non-academic’ pupils via poorly regarded vocational routes.
In 2024, in the light of COVID, the staggering incursions of AI (and my own experience of watching The Boy negotiate both GCSEs and A-Levels), my views have if anything hardened. We are, in schools and universities, not educating but accrediting; ‘sorting’ learners for the convenience of middle-class parents and disengaged (but disparaging) employers. And based on student factors that probably have only the merest connection with future productivity.
What growth-oriented education and training looks like in an AI dominated, as well as climate, ecologically and demographically constrained world is a subject too chunky for this blog. But it is clear that it doesn’t look like an under-resourced version of the education system of England in 1985 – which, for all the in-theory wonders of the new curriculum is essentially what we have as soon as kids reach their teens. The modest changes to GCSEs upcoming in Wales next year are a reflection of this. A move towards more non-exam assessment is welcome, as is the nod to digital enablement (although both raise issues around disadvantage and required resources), but nothing in the 2023 consultation raises the issue of what GCSEs are for in terms of the wider socio-economic and future contexts. Search in vain for the words: economy, society or environment. Search in vain for a public value or economic growth rationale as to why we need for age-16 public exams at all, when almost no learners leave education at this age. My daughter, not yet started on her GCSE journey, will probably enter the labour force in 2030 or 2033. Are we even trying to give her the skills, competencies and flexibilities she might need? And if we aren’t, how can we expect her to be productive?
Spoiler: she’s learning about 1066.
Wales has the powers to completely redesign education, qualifications, and skills provision in pursuit of its national aspirations and yet… we continue to train accountants and plumbers and planners and beauticians and yes, economists, in exactly the same way as anywhere else – despite this having left us for ever at the back of the economic pack. We could junk our 19th century legacy of hyper-narrow professions and workplaces in favour something much more holistic, bespoke and future-focused. And if that means divergence with the rest of the UK, and a lack of outward mobility of skilled youth, well… in pursuit of our growth objective, we don’t want them to leave anyway, do we?
Mo money, no problems?
Growing and improving the workforce mean nothing if there is no good work. And here, of course we mean good private sector jobs: the tax-guzzling non-profit public sector, and incestuously financed third sector are, (for growth purposes remember), no good at all. Wales is seen as suffering from a dearth of development finance, especially for SMEs. Which are basically the entire locally-owned economy. Matching increases and improvements in labour with an increase in capital thus takes us on a path long trodden by poor economies seeking to develop and modernise: Attracting, and in the best cases embedding, Foreign Direct Investment.
I know what you’re thinking: Wales has been here before, and with a little visible effect on closing our GDP gap (although it’s interesting to wonder where Wales’ GDP would be without the FDI successes of the late 20th century). And I would agree that at a time when global FDI is in decline – and inward investment to the UK has been in steep decline since 2016 – placing our bets here seems… optimistic. Indeed, I can take off my growth-economist hat (the one with little helicopter rotors on the top) and slip on my comfy catastrophising Crocs to point out that the key thing for economic growth in Wales over the next decade is to (at least) keep the foreign capital already here. Wales’ private GDP is very dependent on a handful of non-local firms. The back of my envelope, my finger in the air and a squinty eye at HMRC data reckons that a half dozen firms – Airbus; Valero; GE at Nantgarw; Dow; Tata and Celsa – account for a big chunk of Wales’ international exports. The closure of any of these investors, and their valuable inbound earnings would make the growth mountain harder to climb.
This is not to say that nothing new can be done, but a growth-oriented FDI strategy would need nuance, focus and consistency – especially in view of our (current) lack of skills in the workforce. The embedded semiconductor cluster around Newport is an example of the ‘triple helix’ success of government, industry and academia. And our longstanding relationship with Sony led to Pencoed producing over 50 million units of the endlessly versatile Raspberry Pi. The next successes will rely on a sophisticated, targeted and distinctive offer. Could our strengths in Cyber and Fintech not translate into a clear offer for investors based on security? Where is our hydrogen economy going? What are we actually pitching for?
Answers on a postcard please.
Slow Reflections / Strange Delays
You knew us better than we knew ourselves
And the truth it seems to hurt so much –
Bradfield/Wire/Moore
I started this blog as a thought experiment, expecting to reinforce my own beliefs that the pursuit of increased economic growth in Wales was probably futile and, given the increased resource consumption and global South impacts it implies, also unethical. I still believe those things but…writing this blog has also convinced me that there are some potentiallybig synergies between a focus on growth, and a better functioning society overall.
Some of those overlaps might give rise to concerns about the limitations on freedom of individual choice, given the type of government intervention I suggest above, but a laissez faire Wales is not a high growth Wales. It is a sick Wales. A disengaged and despondent Wales. A Wales that disregards economically valuable resources. And, as I’ve said elsewhere before, a Wales that lacks autonomy. Capitalism has gone so wrong in our little corner that there is a good measure of government-directed social re-knitting that would equally fulfil the needs of growth; a wellbeing economy; the foundational economy; doughnut economics…
Maybe we should argue the toss – about what the economy is for – after we’ve re-learned the basics of just… including people, civically and economically.
Any Wales that is fitter for the future is a changed Wales. And that change will only come with deep, embedded, circular and (I would argue) bespoke innovation. Also, the sort of innovation without which economic growth is a dead end. This is the looming question that I have ignored so far in this blog: how do we innovate more (and better) in Wales and then capture those benefits? Can we defy R.S. Thomas, and leave our mouldering quarries and mines to create a dynamic and prosperous future for Wales, here in the present?
The next and final Afallen blog for 2024 will ask just this question.
https://afallen.cymru/2024/10/07/faster-imagining-wales-faster-growth/
Mae’r trydydd post gwadd hwn gan yr Athro Calvin Jones am economi Cymru yn rhan o amcan Afallen o ddyrchafu telerau’r ddadl yng Nghymru ynglŷn â sut mae ein heconomi yn gweithredu – a beth y gellir ei wneud i’w gwella. Gallwch ddarllen blogbost cyntaf Calvin yma , a’i ail bost yma .
Llun pennawd: trwy garedigrwydd David Goehring.
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts.R.S. Thomas
Gwaedlyd uffern Ron, ysgafnhau myn.
Ar y llaw arall… Mae bob amser yn werth cael ychydig o R.S. A oes rhywbeth nad oes yno? Wrth iddo fownsio o gwmpas Cymru, o’r de i’r gogledd, o’r dwyrain i’r gorllewin, wedi’i drwytho gan y dirwedd a’r bobl, daeth yn gallu distyllu a chyfathrebu, yn Saesneg ac yna Cymraeg, rai o’r pethau prin hynny sy’n gyffredinol Gymreig. Pethau a fydd yn dychwelyd yr un nodau gwybodus yn y Glynne Arms ym Mhenarlâg, y Ship & Castle yn Aber, a’r Bunch of Grapes ym Mhonty. Rydyn ni’n ei gael, rydyn ni’n gwybod, rydyn ni ar y dibyn. Wedi’i wneud-i. Ychydig yn crap. Grumblers natur dda. Yn sownd. Mae un o fy ffrindiau mewnfudwyr bob amser yn cael ei daro gan ba mor oddefol ydyn ni (ei gair hi nid fy ngair i!).
Yn bennaf, dwi… kinda dathlu rhan fwyaf o hyn. Mae’n ein gwneud ni’n wahanol. Mewn rhai ffyrdd efallai hyd yn oed yn unigryw. Mae ein hanallu i nofio yn gryf yn y brif ffrwd yn agor dyfroedd cefn diddorol a phyllau dwfn, ac yn ein cymell i feddwl am fywyd a gwaith mewn ffyrdd sy’n fwy eang, cynhwysol a gofalus. Rwy’n hoffi hyn oherwydd rwy’n optimist yn y bôn. Ond nid yw’r cyfan yn dda. Weithiau, ac yn enwedig lle rwy’n byw, mae’n dal i deimlo fel diwrnod olaf streic y glowyr. Diwylliant marw yn taro ar wyneb dynol – am byth. Mae gan Bort Talbot a’r ardaloedd gwyllt gwledig eto i ddod.
Fe wyddoch chi, fy narllenydd cyson annwyl, mai fy ateb i hyn yw anghofio am berthnasedd a ffyniant economaidd, cofleidio lles, a gwyleidd-dra, a chymuned, a’n gilydd, mewn rhyw fath o ddirywiad-cyflwr-cyflwr-doughnut-post- economi carbon-insert-hippy-buzzword Mae gan bawb gwtsh mawr ac maent yn siopa yn Oxfam am lyfrau nodiadau cywarch yn lle Apple ar gyfer rhai alwminiwm wrth baratoi’n feddylgar ar gyfer dyfodol sythu…
Ond (a goddefa fi yma). Beth os ydw i’n anghywir?
gwn. Anodd dychmygu, ynte? Rhoddaf funud ichi.
Os yw twf economaidd o bwys – os mai dyna’r injan ar gyfer trawsnewid hinsawdd a’r newid ecolegol a lles – yna mae angen i ni feddwl sut y gallai Cymru dyfu’n gyflymach o ran CMC traddodiadol. Ynglŷn â’r hyn y mae damcaniaeth a thystiolaeth economaidd yn dweud wrthym am ei wneud; yn strwythurol, yn y tymor hir, yn gyfannol – i ddatblygu cyfeiriadedd twf yr ydym wedi bod yn ddiffygiol ers cenedlaethau.
Ffigur 1: Gwerth Ychwanegol Crynswth y pen (DU=100)
Nid ydym. Yn lle hynny, rydyn ni’n ‘rhagamcanu’ ein heconomi – rydyn ni’n dychmygu porthladd rhydd yma, traffordd newydd yno, rhywfaint o sgiliau niwclear i’r brig, sy’n golygu hyd yn oed pan fydd gennym ni ddatganiad teilwng o’r problemau, mae gennym ni synnwyr cyfyngedig o’r hyn y gallai fod ei angen. mewn gwirionedd yn codi ein CMC y pen, yn y tymor hir, os ydym yn mynd amdani mewn gwirionedd, ac eithrio popeth arall.
Felly. Dyma fy nghymeriad.
Yn ôl i’r Hanfodion. Beth yw Twf Economaidd?
Twf economaidd yw’r hyn rydym yn ei alw pan fo mwy o bethau’n cael eu prynu a’u gwerthu mewn economi o’n dewis eleni, yn hytrach na’r llynedd – unwaith y byddwn yn anwybyddu effeithiau chwyddiant prisiau. Dyna fe. Ddim yn gymhleth, ynte? Hyd nes i chi ddechrau ei fesur, pan fydd angen i chi wneud pethau anodd fel casglu data ar yr holl brynu a gwerthu hwn – nwyddau, gwasanaethau, llafur – ac yna ailddyrannu gwerth y pryniant i’r man lle mae’n dod i ben (mae’n ddrwg gen i i ddweud wrthych nad yw eich bil ffrydio misol erchyll yn gwneud fawr ddim i economi Cymru). Rhaid i chi hefyd benderfynu a ydych yn poeni am faint cyffredinol yr economi (drwy fesur CMC), neu fwy faint o ‘stwff’ sydd wedi’i wasgaru o amgylch eich poblogaeth breswyl (lle mae CMC y pen yn bwysig).
Felly dyna’r ‘beth’. Beth am sut? Wel, os ydych chi eisiau economi fwy mae’n rhaid i chi gael mwy o ‘fewnbynnau’ yn cydweithio i wneud mwy o allbynnau. Mae’r mewnbynnau hyn yn cynnwys llafur a chyfalaf (gyda’r olaf yn cynnwys ffisegol a naturiol er enghraifft). Yn yr achos symlaf, os yw ‘lefel’ economi yn cael ei phennu gan gyfraniad y mewnbynnau hyn, ac yna dim ond os cynyddwch un neu fwy o fewnbynnau y mae twf yn bosibl. Er enghraifft, os bydd cyfranogiad menywod yn y gweithlu yn cynyddu, neu os bydd mewnfuddsoddwr yn dod â chyfalaf ar ffurf ffatri i wlad lai datblygedig – bingo! Ond nid oes rhaid i chi gynyddu pen ôl ar seddi bob amser. Cydnabuwyd ers tro bod cyfalaf dynol – addysg, hyfforddiant, sgiliau – yn chwarae rhan bwysig wrth gynyddu cyfraniad pob un, um, pen. Gall gweithwyr llythrennog, wedi’u haddysgu’n dda ac wedi’u hyfforddi’n dda gyfrannu mwy i gyd. Materion addysg.
Hyd yn hyn, mor dda. Ond mae dod o hyd i fwy o fewnbynnau yn anodd. Mae cynyddu llafur (er enghraifft trwy fewnfudo), cyfalaf, neu lefel addysg yn ymyriadau ‘unwaith ac am byth’. Yn sicr ni allant roi cyfrif llawn am y twf parhaus yr ydym wedi’i weld mewn rhai gwledydd ers cannoedd o flynyddoedd. Yn lle hynny, awgrymodd economegwyr fel Josef ‘yn onest, nid fampir o gwbl’ Schumpeter fod twf economaidd yn bennaf oherwydd ‘dinistr creadigol’ arloesi di-ben-draw; newid technolegol sy’n cynyddu cyfraniad ffactorau economaidd. Enghraifft dda o hyn yw cyn-rhyngrwyd, gallai fod wedi cymryd mis o aros ichi, taith i’r siop bapurau newydd a marwolaeth mil o goed er mwyn i’m, um, doethineb, fynd i mewn i’ch ymennydd trwy beli eich llygaid. Ac eto dyma chi, gyda mi yn eich lefelu’n economaidd, ar unwaith ar eich iPhone 15 16, newyn yn y gwely am 8.30AM. Ystyr geiriau: Shazam!
Gallwch, gallwch gropian i’r ystafell ymolchi am dabled, peidiwch â bod yn hir.
Felly mae’r twf economaidd parhaus sydd ei angen ar Gymru i gau’r bwlch ffyniant yn dibynnu ar ‘broses o drawsnewid parhaus. Y math o gynnydd economaidd … na fyddai wedi bod yn bosibl pe na bai pobl wedi mynd trwy newidiadau dirdynnol.’
Yna mae gwersi yma i Gymru: mwyhau ein mewnbynnau economaidd yn y gwaith yn y rhanbarth (a denu mwy pryd bynnag y gallwn); ac ysgogi – a gwreiddio – arloesedd i’r graddau nas gwelwyd erioed o’r blaen yn y gornel fach hon o’r byd.
Llafur (newydd)
Y peth cyntaf, ac amlycaf i’w nodi yw bod Cymru – ers cenedlaethau – wedi bod ar ei hôl hi o ran rhanbarthau llwyddiannus (neu hyd yn oed gyfartalog) o ran cyfran y bobl sy’n economaidd weithgar; hynny yw, mewn neu’n chwilio am waith. Mae hyn, o ran potensial CMC, adnoddau’n cael eu gwastraffu’n llwyr. Byddai gostwng ein cyfradd anweithgarwch economaidd o’r 28% presennol i gyfartaledd y DU o 22%, a chael yr holl bobl hynny (rhywsut) i mewn i waith yn ychwanegu 115,000 o bobl at y gweithlu a, hyd yn oed yng Nghymru ar gyflog isel, yn ychwanegu bron i £4bn. i’r llinell waelod.
Mae gwneud hynny’n ymarferol, wrth gwrs…yn anodd. Nid yw hyd yn oed galw uchel am lafur ôl-bandemig wedi gwneud llawer i symud y deial – oherwydd mae gennym broblem cyflenwad llafur. Mae pobl yn hŷn; yn sâl; efallai wedi eu dadrithio gan chwedlau eu rhieni a’u neiniau a theidiau; tan-fedrus; tan-ofalu, achos tan-ofalu … creiriau brau ym mhobman. Mae fy nghydweithiwr uchel ei barch Rob Huggins yn siarad, yn anfoddog, am le sydd wedi’i drwytho mewn diymadferthedd dysgedig. Ond mae o’n dod o Beddau felly mae’n siŵr y gallwch chi ei anwybyddu.
Serch hynny, er mwyn gwneud y defnydd gorau o adnoddau economaidd, mae’n amlwg bod yn rhaid i’r tyfwr alluogi, perswadio neu orfodi mwy o bobl yn ôl i (neu i mewn) i waith. Mae gorfodaeth wedi cael ei roi ar brawf dros y degawdau, fel arfer gan lywodraethau cenedlaethol y DU o’r math cywirol, a gyda llwyddiant cyfyngedig iawn, naill ai yn ystod Caledi neu yn ôl yn yr 1980au, pan allai llawer yng Nghymru gilio i fywyd teuluol cost isel, hobïau. a ‘hobbles’ gwaith anffurfiol, yn hytrach na dilyn anogaeth Norman Tebbit i ‘fynd ar eich beic’ a dod o hyd i waith.
Felly’r peth cyntaf ac amlwg i’w wneud yma yw peidio â gwarchae a chosbi (er y gallai hynny ddod), ond helpu’r rhai sydd eisoes eisiau gweithio ond na allant weithio. Nid yn yr economi y mae’r ymyriad allweddol, ond ym maes iechyd a gofal; ac nid yn unig yn y GIG yng Nghymru (neu’r Gwasanaeth Clefydau Cenedlaethol fel y mae cyfaill ymgynghorol yn ei alw), ond yn gyfannol, ym maes iechyd cyhoeddus ataliol a gwella mynediad at waith trwy drafnidiaeth, sgiliau, a gwell systemau gofal plant ac oedolion. Yn ffodus, mae hwn yn faes prin lle gall ein hebog Thatcherit ddod o hyd i bwrpas cyffredin gyda’n hipi hapus-clappy Cenhedlaeth y Dyfodol. Mae iechyd gwael yn brifo pawb. Fel un enghraifft yn unig, ofnadwy, mae’r coesau, y golwg a’r bywydau a gollwyd i ddiabetes Math 2 yng Nghymru yn cynrychioli trasiedïau dynol hynod o drasig ac yn wastraff llafur cynhyrchiol, gan na all y rhai sy’n cael eu cystuddio weithio, ac wrth i fwy a mwy o adnoddau gael eu dargyfeirio i’r swydd. gofalu amdanynt. Nid yw’r gost hanner biliwn a ffrwydrol i Gymru ond yn rhagfynegiad lleiaf o’r dyfodol. Mae hyd yn oed y damcaniaethwr economegydd mwyaf pengaled yn cydnabod bod buddsoddiad yn ofynnol ar gyfer twf yn y dyfodol. O ran ein pobl a seilweithiau galluogi, nid ydym yn gwneud llawer rhy ychydig ohono.
Felly fel man cychwyn, mae Eluned ac RT a Syr Keir yn ei hysgwyd yn gymrawd ac yn gwneud Cymru yn amgylchedd ‘sanitogenig’ sy’n creu iechyd yn hytrach nag amgylchedd sy’n ordew. Yn ffodus, rydyn ni’n gwybod rhywfaint o’r hyn sy’n gweithio. Felly sgriwiwch drethi i lawr (mwy) ar sothach siwgraidd ‘tan y pips (neu’r Coke equivalent) yn gwichian. Ailstrwythuro canol ein trefi, ein safleoedd cyflogaeth a’n mannau hamdden i orfodi’r 10,000 o gamau hynny, cyn belled ag y gallwn. A gwahardd yr holl hysbysebion a nawdd bwyd sothach a sothach, nid dim ond i blant (ac ydw, rydw i’n edrych arnoch chi’n gamblo).
Byddai’n braf meddwl y byddai’r uchod yn mynd yn bell i ddatrys problem gweithgaredd economaidd Cymru (ac, yn achos trethi bwyd sothach, yn cynhyrchu tipyn o arian parod ac yn ein gwneud yn hapusach ac yn iachach). Ond nid yw cael pobl i mewn i swyddi yn llawer o dda os ydynt yn swyddi gwael. Mae Cymru wedi gwneud yn rhyfeddol o dda ers datganoli o ran cynyddu cyfradd cyflogaeth menywod. Ond mae unrhyw effaith ar CMC wedi’i wanhau gan gynhyrchiant isel. Ym 1998, ychydig cyn y Chwyldro Gogoneddus, roedd y gwerth economaidd a grëwyd fesul awr a weithiwyd yng Nghymru yn 86.6% o gyfartaledd y DU. Yn 2021 roedd yn 84.1%.
Angen mwy o waith felly.
Sgiliau i dalu’r biliau?
Nid yw Cymru wedi’i haddysgu’n ddigonol, heb ei hyfforddi’n ddigonol ac felly heb lawer o sgiliau, ac mae hyn yn arbennig o wir am y rhannau tlotaf. O safbwynt twf economaidd, mae hyn yn codi cymaint o faneri coch fel bod clustiau Teirw yn plycio o Lawrenni i Licswm. Mae ein treftadaeth ddiwydiannol yn diflannu yn y cefn, gan ein gadael â heriau addysg a oedd yn anhydawdd wrth i wariant ar addysg disgyblion ac oedolion ostwng trwy Galedi, a COVID difetha galetaf ar y tlotaf. Yn y tymor hwy, mae’r galwadau enfawr y mae ein salwch yn eu gwneud ar wariant cyhoeddus yn golygu mai dim ond os bydd Cymru’n dod yn iachach dros y degawdau nesaf y bydd gwella cyfalaf dynol yn bosibl – fel y bydd o dan fy nghynlluniau synhwyrol a chymedrol uchod! Yr hyn sy’n peri mwy o bryder yw deall sut mae addysg yn cysylltu â thwf economaidd mewn unrhyw economi yn y dyfodol – ac yna sut rydym yn gweithredu’r cysylltiad.
Es i o gwmpas llawer o’r tai hyn yn 2019, gan feddwl sut olwg fyddai ar system addysg oedran ysgol addas ar gyfer y dyfodol yng Nghymru. Gadawaf i chi, annwyl ddarllenydd, edrych ar eich hamdden, ond byddwn yn myfyrio ar y ffaith fy mod wedi awgrymu yn ôl bryd hynny y dylid rhoi’r gorau i gymwysterau TGAU gan eu bod yn hyrwyddo model tra-arglwyddiaethol o ‘addysgu-i-arholiad’, dysgu ar y cof mewn llwybrau cul, ac i bob pwrpas. taflu blynyddoedd ffurfiannol disgyblion ‘anacademaidd’ i ffwrdd trwy lwybrau galwedigaethol a ystyriwyd yn wael.
Yn 2024, yng ngoleuni COVID, cyrchoedd syfrdanol AI (a’m profiad fy hun o wylio The Boy yn trafod TGAU a Safon Uwch), mae fy marn wedi caledu os rhywbeth. Mewn ysgolion a phrifysgolion, nid ydym yn addysgu ond yn achredu; ‘trefnu’ dysgwyr er hwylustod rhieni dosbarth canol a chyflogwyr sydd wedi ymddieithrio (ond yn ddilornus). Ac yn seiliedig ar ffactorau myfyrwyr sydd, yn ôl pob tebyg, â’r cysylltiad lleiaf â chynhyrchiant yn y dyfodol.
Mae sut olwg sydd ar addysg a hyfforddiant sy’n canolbwyntio ar dwf mewn byd AI sy’n cael ei ddominyddu, yn ogystal â’r hinsawdd, sy’n gyfyngedig yn ecolegol ac yn ddemograffig, yn bwnc rhy fras ar gyfer y blog hwn. Ond mae’n amlwg nad yw’n edrych fel fersiwn heb ddigon o adnoddau o system addysg Lloegr ym 1985 – sydd, i holl ryfeddodau mewn theori y cwricwlwm newydd, yn ei hanfod yr hyn sydd gennym cyn gynted ag y bydd plant yn cyrraedd eu harddegau. . Mae’r newidiadau bach i TGAU sydd i ddod yng Nghymru y flwyddyn nesaf yn adlewyrchiad o hyn. Mae symudiad tuag at fwy o asesu di-arholiad i’w groesawu, yn ogystal â’r amnaid i alluogi digidol (er bod y ddau yn codi materion yn ymwneud ag anfantais a’r adnoddau gofynnol), ond nid oes dim yn ymgynghoriad 2023 yn codi mater beth yw pwrpas TGAU o ran y gymdeithas gymdeithasol ehangach. – cyd-destunau economaidd a’r dyfodol. Chwiliwch yn ofer am y geiriau: economi, cymdeithas neu amgylchedd. Chwiliwch yn ofer am werth cyhoeddus neu resymeg twf economaidd ynghylch pam mae angen arholiadau cyhoeddus 16 oed o gwbl, pan nad oes bron unrhyw ddysgwyr yn gadael addysg yn yr oedran hwn. Mae’n debyg y bydd fy merch, nad yw wedi dechrau ar ei thaith TGAU eto, yn ymuno â’r gweithlu yn 2030 neu 2033. A ydym ni hyd yn oed yn ceisio rhoi’r sgiliau, y cymwyseddau a’r hyblygrwydd y gallai fod eu hangen arni? Ac os nad ydyn ni, sut allwn ni ddisgwyl iddi fod yn gynhyrchiol?
Spoiler: mae hi’n dysgu am 1066.
Mae gan Gymru’r pwerau i ailgynllunio’r ddarpariaeth addysg, cymwysterau a sgiliau yn llwyr er mwyn gwireddu ei dyheadau cenedlaethol ac eto… rydym yn parhau i hyfforddi cyfrifwyr a phlymwyr a chynllunwyr a harddwyr ac ie, economegwyr, yn union yr un ffordd ag unrhyw le arall – er gwaethaf hyn. wedi ein gadael am byth yng nghefn y pecyn economaidd. Gallem sothach ein hetifeddiaeth o broffesiynau a gweithleoedd gor-gul yn y 19eg ganrif o blaid rhywbeth llawer mwy cyfannol, pwrpasol sy’n canolbwyntio ar y dyfodol. Ac os yw hynny’n golygu ymwahanu â gweddill y DU, a diffyg symudedd allanol ymhlith ieuenctid medrus, wel… er mwyn mynd ar drywydd ein hamcan twf, nid ydym am iddynt adael beth bynnag, ydyn ni?
Mwy o arian, dim problemau?
Nid yw tyfu a gwella’r gweithlu yn golygu dim os nad oes gwaith da. Ac yma, wrth gwrs rydym yn golygu swyddi da yn y sector preifat: nid yw’r sector cyhoeddus di-elw syfrdanol o dreth, a’r trydydd sector a ariennir drwy losgach, (at ddibenion twf cofiwch), yn dda o gwbl. Ystyrir bod Cymru yn dioddef o brinder cyllid datblygu, yn enwedig i fusnesau bach a chanolig. Sef, yn y bôn, yr economi leol gyfan. Mae cyfateb cynnydd a gwelliannau mewn llafur gyda chynnydd mewn cyfalaf felly yn mynd â ni ar lwybr a sathrwyd ers tro gan economïau tlawd sy’n ceisio datblygu a moderneiddio: Denu, ac yn yr achosion gorau gwreiddio, Buddsoddiad Uniongyrchol Tramor.
Rwy’n gwybod beth rydych chi’n ei feddwl: mae Cymru wedi bod yma o’r blaen, a chydag ychydig o effaith weladwy ar gau ein bwlch CMC (er ei bod yn ddiddorol meddwl ble byddai CMC Cymru heb lwyddiannau FDI diwedd yr 20fed ganrif). A byddwn yn cytuno, ar adeg pan fo FDI byd-eang ar drai – a mewnfuddsoddiad i’r DU wedi bod yn dirywio’n sylweddol ers 2016 – mae gosod ein betiau yma yn ymddangos yn… optimistaidd. Yn wir, gallaf dynnu fy het economi twf (yr un gyda rotorau hofrennydd bach ar y brig) a llithro ar fy nghrocs cyffyrddus trychinebus i nodi mai’r peth allweddol ar gyfer twf economaidd yng Nghymru dros y ddegawd nesaf yw (o leiaf ) cadw’r cyfalaf tramor eisoes yma. Mae CMC preifat Cymru yn ddibynnol iawn ar lond llaw o gwmnïau nad ydynt yn lleol. Mae cefn fy amlen, fy mys yn yr awyr a llygad bach ar ddata CThEM yn meddwl bod hanner dwsin o gwmnïau – Airbus; Valero; GE yn Nantgarw; Dow; Tata a Celsa – sy’n cyfrif am dalp mawr o allforion rhyngwladol Cymru. Byddai cau unrhyw un o’r buddsoddwyr hyn, a’u henillion gwerthfawr i mewn, yn gwneud y mynydd twf yn anos i’w ddringo.
Nid yw hyn yn golygu na ellir gwneud dim byd newydd, ond byddai angen naws, ffocws a chysondeb ar strategaeth FDI sy’n canolbwyntio ar dwf – yn enwedig o ystyried ein diffyg (presennol) o sgiliau yn y gweithlu. Mae’r clwstwr lled-ddargludyddion sefydledig o amgylch Casnewydd yn enghraifft o lwyddiant ‘helics triphlyg’ y llywodraeth, diwydiant a’r byd academaidd. Ac arweiniodd ein perthynas hirsefydlog â Sony at Bencoed yn cynhyrchu dros 50 miliwn o unedau o’r Raspberry Pi, sy’n hynod amlbwrpas. Bydd y llwyddiannau nesaf yn dibynnu ar gynnig soffistigedig, wedi’i dargedu ac unigryw. Oni allai ein cryfderau yn Cyber a Fintech drosi yn gynnig clir i fuddsoddwyr yn seiliedig ar ddiogelwch? Ble mae ein heconomi hydrogen yn mynd? Beth ydyn ni’n anelu ato mewn gwirionedd?
Atebion ar gerdyn post os gwelwch yn dda.
Myfyrdodau Araf / Oedi Rhyfedd
You knew us better than we knew ourselves
And the truth it seems to hurt so much –
Bradfield/Wire/Moore
Dechreuais y blog hwn fel arbrawf meddwl, gan ddisgwyl atgyfnerthu fy nghredoau fy hun mai ofer oedd mynd ar drywydd twf economaidd cynyddol yng Nghymru yn ôl pob tebyg ac, o ystyried y cynnydd yn y defnydd o adnoddau a’r effeithiau byd-eang ar y De y mae’n ei awgrymu, hefyd yn anfoesegol. Rwy’n dal i gredu’r pethau hynny ond … mae ysgrifennu’r blog hwn hefyd wedi fy argyhoeddi bod yna rai synergeddau mawr posibl rhwng ffocws ar dwf, a chymdeithas sy’n gweithredu’n well yn gyffredinol.
Gallai rhai o’r gorgyffwrdd hynny arwain at bryderon ynghylch y cyfyngiadau ar ryddid dewis unigol, o ystyried y math o ymyriad gan y llywodraeth yr wyf yn ei awgrymu uchod, ond nid yw Cymru laissez faire yn Gymru twf uchel. Mae’n Gymru sâl. Cymru wedi ymddieithrio ac yn ddigalon. Cymru sy’n diystyru adnoddau sy’n werthfawr yn economaidd. Ac, fel y dywedais mewn man arall o’r blaen, Cymru sydd â diffyg ymreolaeth. Mae cyfalafiaeth wedi mynd mor anghywir yn ein cornel fach ni fel bod yna fesur da o ailwau cymdeithasol dan gyfarwyddyd y llywodraeth a fyddai’n diwallu anghenion twf i’r un graddau; economi lles; yr economi sylfaenol; economeg toesen…
Efallai y dylen ni ddadlau’r llanast – am beth yw pwrpas yr economi – ar ôl i ni ailddysgu hanfodion dim ond… gan gynnwys pobl, yn ddinesig ac yn economaidd.
Mae unrhyw Gymru sy’n fwy ffit ar gyfer y dyfodol yn Gymru sydd wedi newid. A dim ond gydag arloesi dwfn, wedi’i wreiddio, yn gylchol ac (byddwn yn dadlau) y daw’r newid hwnnw. Hefyd, y math o arloesedd y mae twf economaidd yn ben draw hebddo. Dyma’r cwestiwn ar y gorwel yr wyf wedi’i anwybyddu hyd yn hyn yn y blog hwn: sut ydym ni’n arloesi mwy (a gwell) yng Nghymru ac yna’n dal y buddion hynny? A allwn herio R.S. Thomas, a gadael ein chwareli mowldio a mwyngloddiau i greu dyfodol deinamig a llewyrchus i Gymru, yma yn y presennol?
Bydd blog nesaf a olaf Afallen ar gyfer 2024 yn gofyn y cwestiwn hwn yn unig.
This second guest post by Professor Calvin Jones about Wales’ economy is part of Afallen’s objective of elevating the terms of the debate in Wales about how our economy operates – and what can be done to improve it. You can read Calvin’s first blog post here.
Header photo: courtesy of Jim Nix.
London never sleeps it just sucks,
The life out of me,
And the money from my pocket.‘Londinium’
Mark Roberts / Catatonia
© Brodyr Warner 1998
Ah, what a song. But is it a metaphor or… just a song?
The problem (as defined by me)
So. We all know Wales has some longstanding economic… issues. There has been a tendency by some – perhaps increasing – to blame our economic woes on the ‘noisy neighbours’, handily dovetailing with concerns about cultural and linguistic marginalisation over the centuries. It was the English what did it!
So far so defensible. Maybe? But this notion ignores the (resolutely English) single mother scraping by on Universal Credit in Newcastle. Welsh ‘economic exceptionalism’ wilts a little when you realise the UK is probably the most regionally unbalanced country in Europe. As I have previously argued there is something different about peripheral economies and Wales does seem to suffer from peripherality more than most, but the specific ‘Welshness’ of this needs unpacking. We might start with the more widely applicable notion that ‘development develops inequality’ through a process of unequal exchange. Markets are organised, and this is done by powerful firms, institutions and countries that are resolutely core – right in the middle of the nexus of relationships, geography, intellectual property and ownership that constitute political-economic power. Then, if the system allows such actors to exploit and extract critical natural and human resources that might emerge in the periphery, well… them’s the rules.
It is one thing to recognise and (as I do) accept this characterisation of the global economic system. Quite another to know what to do about it. As Joshua discovered in Wargames, sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
But that seems… impossible. So how do we play to win? Or at least lose less badly? How do we halt or at least reduce the flow of value out of our little part of the periphery, and capture more of it here?
Solution the First: Play their game better
Imagine Wales is a rusty old bucket. With a dragon on you say? OK, fill your boots. But try to fill the bucket with money – from the Westminster block grant to the Welsh Government, and out via procurement; or from Welsh residents’ wages or welfare payments; or from Wales-based company exports; and it all drains away through the holes in the bottom. Fill those holes and the money stays longer, adding more wages, profits, and wellbeing.
Plugging the holes – stopping the leaks can take many forms. And it is potentially powerful, because we start from a low base – this is, for example, an overwhelmingly farmed country that imports almost all its food. Nuts! My economic model suggests if we could shift these purchases so that just, say, 10% more of consumer spend was on Welsh food – so about 85% imported instead of 95% – we could add over £1 billion to Welsh output, £500m to value added, and create around 9,000 jobs. If, of course, we could find the land to grow the food people want, and at the price they could afford. More on which… later. Or perhaps in a future blog if my head starts hurting.
This form of localisation has of course more than purely economic benefits. The pandemic and subsequent supply shocks (Ukraine, that bloody boat) made it crystal clear that long supply chains are often vulnerable supply chains – the last thing you want for critical products (like, I dunno, medicine). Meanwhile, exchanging functionally identical products between countries may make economic sense (somehow) but is energy-and-climate bonkers.
It’s not just ‘stuff’ of course. The 16th Century Acts of Union welcomed Wales into England’s warm legal embrace, and the consequence, half a millennium later, is a suite of common EnglandandWales legal and professional structures. Not only judges, but planners, architects, and lawyers of all kinds can work (pretty much) seamlessly across the porous border. The result has definitively not been the hollowing out of the English professional class by expansionary Welsh firms ?.
This financial, professional, competence, and I would argue, ‘civic’ leakage has left us with an economy that is narrow and weak, and a cultural life lacking depth and reach. Is it any wonder that graduates from Welsh universities (along with those from the North) flock to the South East of the UK to work? Or that the UK Government, along with private companies simply can’t find an excuse to undertake R&D in Wales – in fact, anywhere outside the ‘Golden Triangle’? Or that Welsh companies are always the acquired, never the acquirer?
Plugging the leaks – playing this game better – means concentrated, nuanced engagement with a system that is stacked against the peripheral. It means, for example, going far beyond what Karel Williams characterises as the ‘postcode stock-take’ of current public procurement tracking, welcome though that is. On this side, things are now harder with the new(ish) UK Internal Market Act which ensures no regulation will “directly or indirectly discriminate against a service provider from another part of the UK”. So – no local sourcing for its own sake, any more than when Brussels was looking over our shoulder. This is the sort of ‘level playing field’ that ignores structural power and pre-existing financial ‘clout’. And works so well in sport of course.
For the public sector then, deep thought is needed to reshape procurement to genuinely demand ‘foundational economy’ and social (and perhaps cultural/linguistic) benefits in ways that will be naturally more deliverable by – and this is important – responsible, sustainable and embedded Welsh businesses. To ensure that the new Social Partnership Act comes to life in a way that, perhaps, the Future Generations Act initially struggled to. And critically, to be prepared to pay more for contracts that deliver a wider range of benefits, and which at least begin to change the structure of the Welsh economy. To (as Karel Williams and Kevin Morgan suggest) actually resource, develop and reward strategic procurement as a profession in Wales. To work to a situation where we procure locally, not out of the goodness of our public sector hearts, but because it delivers. Easy then.
Of course, localisation is not only about public procurement. The largest UK experiment in re-localisation so far was of a completely different sort. To illustrate, in England the ‘Preston’ model’ focused on the localisation of public procurement to deliver a claimed £40m improvement in the town and perhaps £200m across Lancashire as a whole. Excellent stuff. But Scotland meanwhile has undertaken the localisation – indeed, effective autarkisation – of its £10bn higher education system. Students don’t go in, students don’t come out! Around 85% of Scotland’s UK-resident students are Scottish, and the great majority stay there after graduation – with of course huge impacts on the economy. It’s like North Korea, but with worse weather and an unstable political system.
And this is the result of a deliberate and calculated decision by their regional government – right at the start of devolution – to treat Scots differently but only if they made an education decision seen as more widely beneficial. Could we do this in Wales? Well, there was clearly no appetite when tuition fees were last examined by Kirsty Williams in 2017, and perhaps our smaller sector makes it a bit more difficult to sell: eight universities compared to fifteen (as of today, Tuesday, but don’t hold me to that). But this is a sector that is about to undergo a significant cross-UK shake-out in any case, as international student numbers collapse and the business model goes with them. Here we have a real and urgent opportunity to re-localise. At the moment, there is little ‘extrinsic’ incentive for academics to set themselves the task of helping solve Wales’ problems over a sustained period; no large ongoing research pots, or ‘local impact weightings’ in career progression or hiring for example. Given the difficulties inherent in squeezing globally-recognised papers from studies of a small, data-poor regions, it is left to individual academics to undertake (often excellent) work through the hard yards of developing external stakeholder relationships, and bending large UK-level grants to Wales-appropriate ends.
Given the almost laughably low level of business and government R&D undertaken in Wales, can we really afford the vast majority of academic research in Wales not to be for Wales? If Universities are looking down the barrel of big reductions in the international student fees that currently subsidise research, a new funding model will be needed. And maybe, at the same time, some new objectives found.
What was that thing about never wasting a good crisis?
There are potentially other big localisations we can consider. For example, whilst the £10bn of local government pension funds under management by Hymans (checks the internet: no office in Wales) are doing well in terms of fossil disinvestment and climate risk, the proportion invested in Wales seems to be, as far as I can judge, £68m… Nought point seven percent. And look, I know this is complicated, I know there’s a primary fiduciary duty on trust managers, and perhaps Welsh investments are more risky but…. 0.7%? Really? And we’ve been talking about this for years, and getting nowhere. In 2018 the Institute for Welsh Affairs suggested that Welsh pensions weren’t invested in Wales due to the “cultural and behavioural decisions of pension fund trustees, boards and consultants/ investment managers”. Basically, London folks can’t be bothered with understanding, and carrying out due diligence, on such trivially small investments in this wonky little peninsular. And nobody makes them. Even though it’s our money.
This stuff, this £10bn, matters (especially in a context where our public sector can’t easily borrow against the future). If we don’t even invest our own money here… why would anyone else? This is not all down to the pension fund supply side however: If all that is on offer in Wales small yet politically toxic renewables, we will get nowhere in developing a more locally oriented investment model – in pensions or elsewhere. Joining up floating, responsible and patient funds with at-scale, commercially attractive investment opportunities in socially, climate and ecologically useful stuff is a priority. But I’m not sure we even really understand the key barriers, let alone have the will to address them. A similar argument might be made at the other end – for a more bespoke Welsh finance system better suited to the needs of our micro organisations. But the Interwebz reveal I first argued for a Cardiff stockmarket over a decade ago, and I do hate repeating myself ?.
Solution the second: Invent another game
So… it is perhaps possible to play this game better, by identifying where Wales is especially weak, where opportunities exist to lever greater local value, and then to focus on both big-ticket and long-grind interventions that might make a difference. But… we live in a world where the material prosperity we chase is fundamentally enabled by ecological destruction, climate chaos, huge flows of materiel and economic value, from the global south, and deeply unpleasant impacts on the poorest. Striving to be a slightly bigger dog in a dog-eat-dog world is in my view (and that of the Future Generations Act) a non-starter. The re-localisation of production – and even adding circularity – does nothing unless we also deal with the other half of the equation: our hyper-global, and hyper-problematic consumption.
Despite some measurement, governments talk much less about the radical changes to our consumption habits needed to secure a liveable future. The unsustainability of consumption is not unrelated to the remoteness of the consumer from where the goods are produced. We never see the emissions created as flowers are flown from Kenya to our local petrol station, just-in-time for 8pm on your anniversary. I have literally no idea which server is streaming my Netflix-Disney+-AppleTV-Paramount film at any given time, let alone how its powered, or whether any children were harmed in the production of the phone I’m watching on). And we pay almost none of the (horrific) environmental costs of all the food we eat. All a bit depressing I know. Think I need a few days in Ibiza to recover.
This, then is perhaps another emergency we can’t afford to waste? Wales has done really quite badly from the existing system of global capitalism. Surely a new, more sustainable system would be naturally (sic) more local, helping keep prosperity in Wales and wellbeing high?
Well, maybe. And maybe not.
The first point to make is that Wales is, really, a very unlocalised economy right now, for almost all our big purchases: Food, financial services, energy are just some of the biggest, most leaky examples. To switch these to regional supply to any meaningful extent not only requires a geographical transition but also a product transition, on both sides: for example, in both what we eat and what we grow. And the elephant in the room is that once we bring this stuff closer to home, it’s more costly – firstly because we lose out on all the cheap land and cheap labour and cheap energy that currently underpins our imports, and secondly because there’s only any point in doing this if we incorporate the costs of ‘externalities’ in production.
Escaping our history
I look to the future, it makes me cry (well not really, I couldn’t resist it). More seriously, this is… quite a difficult ask in a country where a fifth of children are already living in absolute poverty and where the public sector is currently undergoing decimation-by-Barnett. It is hard therefore to see how any substantive transformation towards locality could happen without significant income redistribution, a completely different regulatory and tax approach, and deep behaviour change on the part of consumers. That’s going to look great on the side of a 2026 election campaign bus.
In the absence of these frankly unlikely things, maybe we are left with just playing the existing game a bit better, taking small wins where we can, and hoping that this translates to a slightly less crap outcome. But remember, crises aren’t often obvious until they arrive. A decade ago, when I was writing about peak oil and feeling especially hopeless (but had more hair), I would be asked what would get the fossil-fuel addicted Welsh economy ‘off oil’ – given the same social and political constraints we face now…
My answer back then would be ‘the fall of the Saudi government and its replacement by an Al-Qaeda junta that turned off the taps’. That never happened, and Wales remains resolutely carbonised. But the point is not lost. Any one of a number of tipping points – ecological, climate, geopolitical or financial – could significantly reduce our ability to draw resources from across the globe. The signs are already there. Bankruptcy happens gradually, and then suddenly. Economic transformation and a higher reliance on our own resources is, I believe not a choice. Our choice is whether it is careful or chaotic. Just, or just exploitative. A more local, self-sufficient, resilient and fair Wales can and should be imagined – indeed, our Future Generations Act demands it. The good thing is that imagination costs nothing.
Comments
3 responses to “Must Everything Go? The Prospects for economic (re-)localisation in Wales”
@davidoclubb @admin @calvjones you can more readily affect what’s close, especially if primed.
Part of the growth, of ‘post growth’ economics has been the #WFGAct – but now it needs a reservoir of watering.
A way to do that, get the Welsh public bought in to it.
Wellbeing economics can readily appeal to our intrinsic higher values, especially now, when it’s got real hard to ignore the world’s abused by billionaires hands, & how their money has corrupted power structures, our communities.
@nspugh @davidoclubb @admin @calvjones it may sound peripheral, but self-esteem can be rocket fuel in economic development. It is beyond time for both of the Welsh and English to realise that the basis of English grammar is essentially Welsh, not Anglo-Saxon.
I cannot help but think that once there is a general realisation that English is essentially bastardised Welsh the attitudes of each country toward each other will undergo a sea change.
This guest post by Professor Calvin Jones, published on St David’s Day 2024, is part of Afallen’s ongoing work to stimulate debate about the opportunities to create prosperity in Wales by thinking and doing differently.
Header photo: the Amazon Warehouse (‘fulfillment centre’) in Swansea, obtained from Coflein.gov.uk.
“The original marginality, of course, was that of poverty, a cramped and pinched community of small commodity producers unable to generate capital … its most vivid symptoms the great droves of skinny cattle and skinny people tramping into England to be fattened.”
Gwyn Alf Williams
‘When was Wales?’
BBC Wales Annual Radio Lecture, 1979
When was Wales?
Gwyn Alf, love him, bless his cotton socks and his nailed-on Dowlais righteousness, wrote in 1979 about a Wales that was long-gone. A Wales whose hearts were manifold, Cymraeg and rural, and where Dowlais’ seventeen iron foundries would have seemed like… well Satanic mills. But he could have written something very like it about the 1870s, when our coal was rushed to the coast to power the Empire at sea; or the 1930s when we left in our hundreds of thousands to service the new light industries to London’s west. Or the 1990s, when Welsh-made VCRs and Camcorders and batteries and steel and car exhausts went out with other people’s names on them to be inserted into other peoples’ homes, or bolted onto other people’s stuff.
Or indeed, he could have written it about today.
There’s something very odd about this, at least on the surface. Basic economic theory tells us we can’t prosper without being competitive; without exporting; without paying our way in the world. Yet, for centuries, in varied ways, we’ve done just that. But without the ‘prospering’ bit. Dig a bit further, at the edges of economic theory (the bits that don’t get you audiences with PMs or lucrative speaking invitations in the City, trust me I know) and you realise that what you export matters. And exporting ‘basic’ commodities – y’know, the stuff that keeps us fed, watered, lit-up and warm – is a fool’s game. As is exporting people. Dig even further, so that your theoretical spade goes right through and you fall beneath notice, and you realise also that who owns stuff really matters.
You can’t understand Wales without understanding this. Ignore at your peril.
Ownership
A lack of ownership is endemic across Wales. It occurs in manufacturing; in utilities; in private services; and in real estate. It brings trouble. A lack of autonomy; of control over our economic – and hence social and environmental – future. The shaping of Wales by outside forces (and, let’s not forget, the shaping of the Gogledd and the west by those peskily numerous Hwntw) is limiting. It limits product diversification, and process (let alone product) innovation. It limits occupations, and hence wages, progression and inclusion. It limits prosperity, the business mix, clustering, and agglomeration – and hence market size and diversity, with consequent knock-ons to business formation, business retention and the scope and nature of inward investment. The characteristic of Wales as marginal – economically, politically, culturally – shapes it, shapes us, profoundly.
The impacts of our unequal relationship with the world are easy to see – and easiest to see in the economy. The oftenest quoted statistic is that of Gross Domestic Product, GDP, where Wales’ per-capita level was in 2021 quite staggeringly 25% below the UK average. Ynys Môn, along with a few other UK communities dominated by out-commuting is almost 50% lower. But turning to metrics that Governments really care about – tax revenues – makes the case even more starkly.
Wales’ tax revenues
As Figure 1 shows, Wales performs very poorly indeed on tax revenue streams that reflect the health and diversity of the economy. On a population share of 4.6% of the UK, we contribute some 2.8% of UK income tax – so on a per-capita basis, 40% lower (because hardly anyone in Wales earns much). Our per-capita corporation tax is 45% below the UK average (we’re stuffed full of tiny companies making no money). Our Capital Gains Tax – paid by both business and people for, well basically being capitalists – is an astonishing 67% lower on a per-capita basis (we own very little and what we do own never goes up). If this wasn’t bad enough, it turns out we pay pretty much our population share of VAT (meaning we pay 33% more VAT per unit of economic value added), and… more than our share of fuel duty as we traverse our wide-open spaces without an Elizabeth Line (or a bus route) to call our own.
Of course, the way out of this mess is economic growth. So it’s handy that the motor of innovation and growth, spending on Research & Development, is in Wales a healthy… [Checks notes. Checks notes again. Throws notes in bin.].
Figure 1: Financial & Economic Metrics Compared to UK Population Share (% UK). Notes & Sources: population, taxes, R&D, GDPThe de-industrialisation of Wales
None of this is at all new. The hustle and bustle of coal, and steel, and the consequent capital inflows, infrastructure and civic investments hid Wales’s fundamental economic marginality. Post World War Two, active regional policy and strong social safety net did much the same job. But even big numbers in attracting inward investment through the 1980s and 1990s could not mask the deep dysfunction uncovered by de-industrialisation, and the Thatcherite determination to throw Britain’s industrial regions out of the national economic tent, or continue the fiction that Wales was going places. There remained, however the narrative that taking this most globally-embedded of regions, and thrusting it even deeper into the global-competitive sharkpool (along with the similarly benighted North) would do the job of reconstruction and rebirth. Just a few more skills and entrepreneurs, some better start ups, and more roads and business parks to sate the hunger of ever-mobile firms and success would come…
Instead, the picture has been one of ossification. If we rank UK regions by GDP per head, we see the same team, London, has won the ‘economic premiership’ in every one of the 37 years since comparable records began. The South East has finished second in all-but-one of those years, and the only change of note at the top has been canny Scotland, the wheel that squeaks, establishing itself as a fixture in the Champions’ League at the expense of the East Midlands. Meanwhile at the other end the regulation candidates are the same in 2021 as in 1985, and in only four of those 37 years has any of these perennial laggards dragged itself briefly out of the bottom three. And it wasn’t us.
In 1985, in the depths of Thatcherite hollowing out, and bloodied from the miners’ strike, Welsh GDP-per-head was at around 68% of London’s figure.
In 2021 it was 43%.
Go figure.
Figure 2: Ranking of UK Regions by GDP/GVA Per Capita 1985-2021Blame the English?
It is tempting to blame this all on the noisy neighbours, the English. And it is 100% their fault. But whilst this was perhaps defensible a thousand years ago, since the Acts of Union in the 16th Century, the Welsh as individuals (if not Welsh as a culture) have been more-or-less equal to the English under the law. Welsh firms, workers, lawyers and accountants have been blessed with the full weight of the English Crown’s protection (but until 1993, only in Saesneg of course), and allowed full access to big English markets, and to key resources both in and beyond these islands (hallo the Empire!). Indeed, looking across Europe and beyond shows many culturally distinct minorities have, despite historic disapprobation of the majority, levered themselves into advantageous economic positions in their respective nation. The Basques and Catalans in Spain, and the Québécois provide an object lesson, Whereas Galicia, Italy’s Mezzogiorno and lots of First Nations an abject one.
Moreover, whatever historical happenstance and cumulative causality, today’s owners of Wales’ territorial capital are in many cases not English. In the energy sector for example we see key facilities owned by French and German multinationals, and equity ownership by European governments and municipalities alongside British entities. The economic dominance that draws Welsh graduates and companies away, and denies us infrastructure and capital is not England v Wales but London v the rest. Our history, geography, and geology placed us at the bottom of British heap. We are similarly at the bottom of the global value chain: still relatively rich in useful stuff, including energy and willing people, so worth resource-seeking inward investment when the valuable stuff, ideas or people can’t be bought out, shipped out or tempted away, but nowhere you’d go to sell anything! Too small. Too boring. Too poor.
Wales should be more Basque
But, but, but… our history is not our destiny. It is part of the reason for our poverty, but not the full story. Consider our Basque friends in Euskal Herria: Brutalised by Franco from the bombing of Gernika in 1937 until the day he died in 1975. Then living with decades of terrorism and unrest. An infrastructure deficit that leaves them still, in 2024, without a single high speed rail link in a Spain that seems to build them like Scalextric. A topography that never lets up, including a half-dozen peaks that would kick sand in the face of Y Wyddfa. But with a GDP per head only just behind that of the leader Madrid, and household disposable income some 30% higher than the Spanish average. Calvin, people say to me, what’s the lesson for Wales from the Basque experience? And I say… be chasing whales across the Atlantic in rowboats before Columbus was a boy. Cosy up to the Romans in their fights against those bloody Celts and cement your culture and language in the empire. Develop an approach to the economy that is embedded in your Cynefin and your people. Save, lend, borrow, own, locally. Care deeply about craft; building a reputation, European networks and prosperity on the consequent reputation. Be the closest bit of your country to big EU markets. Make actual products (cooperatively!) like bikes and buses. Have the confidence to believe in yourself; set your own rules, remember your past, keep your own coin, be self-reliant.
In short, be Basque.
The trouble is almost none of that is possible for Wales.
But… but… but… we don’t actually want to be Basque. Here’s what I think the problem is. The Basque Country has done incredibly well in carving a distinctive, almost unique position in the highly networked, financially integrated, trade-heavy, and fossil-fuelled European economy. But that economy is going away, to be replaced by something nobody can see yet but which will, despite all the chat about carbon capture and (permit me a small LOL) sustainable aviation, look completely different. It remains to be seen whether that small corner of Spain can lever past success in craft and process innovation, and its relative reverence for home and nation, into economic transformation. A landscape of highly specialised but relatively insular clusters, a ‘top down’ (and fairly inflexible) approach to innovation, and relative weakness in scientific and university research does not bode that well. Additionally, and importantly, their current success means the Basques have a lot to lose should current economic relationships and behaviours be upended. My own conversations over many years with colleagues from both favoured and less favoured bits of the Basque economy and innovation system suggests this is not an atmosphere that necessarilywelcomes robust ‘kicking of the conceptual tyres’ with open arms.
So back to Wales, back to the future, and onward to optimism; onward to a take where traditional economic weakness (and having relatively, nothing to lose) may turn into a modest advantage in upcoming battles. Where small green shoots of policy difference might grow into mighty oaks that shelter us from ever-growing storms. Where our own focus on home and hwyl, on cynefin and community, might find expression in a more robust, realistic, fair and responsible economy that bends to the wellbeing of people, here and elsewhere. But if this is to happen, it won’t happen by accident. And it won’t happen without tough and honest choices, and the slaughter of some very sacred cows. Without radical policies, coherent across time, place, and topic. Without clear eyes on our destination and what’s needed to get there. And without some practical, clear and thoughtful policies. Done now and with feeling.
And that, dear reader, is where we will be going next.
