Category Archives: Economic Forecasts

Nottingham, a city of making

Academic underpinning of development - Nottingham has two universities...
Academic underpinning of development – Nottingham has two universities…

We featured the early results for GDP from the Office of National Statistics for Quarter 2 in 2013 recently. These are now firm and the results are detailed below. The slight air of optimism about UK Ltd continues to be felt, we would argue.

UK gross domestic product (GDP) in volume terms was estimated to have increased by 0.7% between Q1 2013 and Q2 2013, unrevised from the Second Estimate of GDP published 23 August 2013. Between Q4 2012 and Q1 2013, GDP in volume terms increased by 0.4%, revised up from the previously estimated 0.3% increase.

We were also delighted to read a recent article in the national press, where Nottingham, our home city, was cited by the Governor of the Bank of England as a ‘bell-weather’ for the UK economy. With data showing that nine out of ten jobs in the city are currently in the service sector, a move back to ‘creative manufacturing’, in all it’s diversity, is a great echo to the high Victorian energy of the city.

Katie Allen, writing in The Guardian, described Mark Carney’s view of Nottingham as a city where growth was rising, but that the quality of that growth and innovation was also significant. Gone are bicycles and cigarettes, but they are replaced by significant entities in bio-science, engineering and the arts/creative sector.

Examples in our city include the creation of new Creative Quarter Community Interest Company, as well as the delivery of a new BioCity development to foster the city’s lead in the sciences.

With the development of the Creative Quarter, it is great to see social business as a key plank in the city’s developing enterprise structure.

If, as a social business looking to make an inward investment, or to explore the context of Nottingham a start-up or social business development setting – you can find the city’s Growth Plan online here.

The team at SEEM, with our expertise in social business start-up and skills in delivering social finance would be happy to help you shape your project too. Contact us here…


Interesting web resources:

Mapping the Moment – a map based examination of the ‘cultural industries’ in Nottingham between 1857 – 1867

Knitting Together – an examination of the East Midlands knitting industry, 1600 to 1970. (Much changes in the economic landscape for our city and its hinterland, but much remains the same. New technologies, mergers, enterprise rise and fall…)

Ethical business with a social dimension...
Ethical business with a social dimension…

Quarter 2 results – UK Limited

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has just published its new preliminary data for Quarter 2 contributors to Gross Domestic Product in the UK. It is the first time, according to the ONS, that all principle sectors of UK business have seen positive growth since mid-2010.

The short video below illustrates the ONS data, showing how core business sectors relate to each other and contribute the UK economy as a whole. Services, as a broad economic theme, now represent the largest contributor to ‘UK Limited’.

Aggregated services in the analysis has continually performed well, since the massive economic contraction in 2009. To have so many core indicators rising must be a sign of improvement, or rather a sign that using traditional metrics, the economy has begun to recover.

What is never delineated in such metrics or traditional analysis is the change of thinking, or ‘modality rotation’ that might be occurring as a result of downturns altering mindsets, philosophical attitudes to investment or changes to the political landscape in communities.

In our next, fuller journal post, we will examine the concept of ‘community economics’, and how the emergence of ideas, which we have commented on in recent Mining the SEEM articles, have arguably coalesced into a new economic form.

Hope for the future?

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Ethical business with a social dimension...
Ethical business with a social dimension…

You can see more of the work of SEEM here…