being a city
Ten years on... an economic reflection
By Dr Jonathan Deacon Reader in Marketing and Entrepreneurship, University of Wales, Newport
I
t would be easy to be negative about ‘our’ city and what has happened in the past ten years since Newport was granted city status.
Being able to sell ourselves as a city
has been crucial for the path we have taken over the last decade – and I think we should be positive about what that has allowed us to do. Having the coveted status is no doubt
important in the economic development of any conurbation, as much as it is for any other part of development. Being known as a small city, rather than a large town can only ever be a good thing. We have to admit that negativity can
be a central feature of our psyche here in South Wales. We’re pretty good at running ourselves down, looking on the dark side and assuming that everyone else is having a better time of it than we are.
But hang on – we forget so easily two important factors: what we’ve achieved in the past ten years and what we could achieve in another ten! Ten years ago the economic base of
the city was really quite different for that of today. Newport has always been a proud
industrial trading city and the city grew up around making things and then exporting those products around the world. Things like steel and things made from steel. Then around the turn of the millennium
we became much more aware of the growth of the BRIC economies. Brazil, Russia, India and, of course, China – rapidly developing, fast growth and low wage economies which tore at the heart of the UK manufacturing industry. Newport, with our historical
economic reliance upon manufacturing
and engineering, became a city in need of transition.
In 2000 a little over 30 per cent of our
local economy was built on manufacturing, today that figure is less than 20 per cent – the slack being taken up by service sector activity. OK – so that sounds a little bit negative
– but what we need to remember is that the manufacturing that has remained is now far more ‘value added’, global and skill intensive than ever before. When we talk about ‘value added’
by the way, we mean that the products that we now make in Newport have a high degree of service added to them. So aspects like design, specialist engineering processes and after sales service contracts. With the help of the South Wales
Chamber of Commerce many of our local manufacturing firms have raised their
18 THEbusiness QUARTER
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60