Trends and Surprises

By Colin Fletcher, SAMI Fellow and Gill Ringland, SAMI Fellow, who recently worked with Think London to brief a breakfast meeting of senior business advisers, to look at the priorities for Think London over the next decade.

Key Trends

We presented some key trends which we consider are likely to face us over the next ten years and asked where surprises might come from.

• The major trend we foresaw was the growth of economic and political power of China and India, with Korea and other Asian economies also growing fast. This is linked to demographics, with India and other developing countries having young populations.

• The second major trend is technology – communications, consumer electronics, IT and biotech, all changing the way we do business, not just supporting outsourcing and off-shoring but changing the way we work – including working from home and remotely.

• The third trend is mobility of people – fuelled by the expansion of education and visibility of lifestyles through the media- between countries and to the Cities.

• The fourth trend is around the awareness of the environment – water shortages, finite oil supplies, and climate change. We could see for instance a rebirth of shipping as public attitudes to flying become negative.

• And finally – the day before the Haymarket attempted bombings – we saw that terrorist activities would start to impinge on every day life.

Where could the surprises come from?

• Europeans tend to assume that the US will continue to work with Europe on international issues. But 9/11 changed attitudes in the US towards a “US needs to take care of its own” approach. This is reinforced by loss of competitiveness & trade barriers, by the fact that few of this generation of decision makers in the US have personal links to Europe, and large scale immigration from Spanish-speaking America. These forces are changing the US, and we should expect to see manifestations in the next decade.

• Could Chinese growth, and funding of the US deficit, unwind? This would have a major impact on financial markets world-wide. A time to watch is after the Beijing Olympics, when a property crash could take banks under.

• Could a pandemic or terrorist act have a major impact on economies? We are seeing the effect of 9/11 and 7/7 on society, but neither caused blips in the economy of the US or UK. What sort of pandemic could have a major impact? It would have to take out a significant share of a country’s working population to affect the economy substantially. Could a terrorist act affect the economy? The UK government has focused on analysis of the UK’s networks to minimise this risk but the threat is constantly evolving.

• Could climate change cause storms and flooding severe enough to disrupt the economy? We saw the effect of flooding in South Yorkshire, with “no trains north of Doncaster”. If, however, central London were flooded for several days, it would change public perception, and start then to impact the economy.

  1 July 2007.