A slow climb to recovery

In doing so, it reveals that there is certainly optimism abroad, and that in spite of ten years of economic stagnation, as measured by annual Island income adjusted for inflation, many businesses believe that a corner has been turned.

For his own part, Economic Development Minister Alan Maclean, whose views are presented in the review, acknowledges that all sectors have faced extremely challenging conditions for the past two years and more, and that even the finance industry has experienced a significant decline. It has, alas, a lot of ground to make up before it sees any real growth.

Nevertheless, Senator Maclean detects those famous green shoots of recovery that some UK politicians are so fond of mentioning at every opportunity. Some of his evidence comes from the latest Business Tendency Survey, which was conducted at the end of last year.

Although this failed to yield uniformly favourable results, many business people were far more bullish about the prospects for the coming year and were even speaking about creating new jobs.

The Senator has, meanwhile, spoken about new initiatives which demonstrate that government – though it is undoubtedly hamstrung by many influences far beyond Island control – is not passively waiting for recovery. A new Economic Growth Plan is being formulated, as is a new Tourism Strategy, which is due to be published well before the autumn election.

However, if plans and strategies can be regarded by sceptics as mere paper exercises or, in some instances, hopeless examples of wishful thinking, concrete developments are harder to criticise. For example, real money is being spent on raising skill levels in the Island workforce and real legislation has been introduced to enable us to add e-gaming and intellectual property businesses to our range of profitable activities.

As Senator Maclean says, there is a long way to go before we are able to heave a collective sigh and say ‘thank goodness that’s over’, but there is prospect of a return to much-needed economic growth, even if, as the Fiscal Policy Panel forecasts, progress in the short term is going to remain slow.