CBI has vision and ambition for larger manufacturing sector
1 min read
The CBI has released a four-page document, titled 'Vision and ambitions for UK manufacturing', suggesting that improvement in three key measures will see manufacturing become a larger part of the UK economy.
"Delivering on three broad ambitions to improve productivity, enhance innovation leadership and increase export growth will be central in achieving the vision," the report states.
On productivity, the CBI says that while UK manufacturing productivity is "already very good", at 4% per annum, and consistently above that of the service sector, it should improve it to 5%, taking it ahead of the USA, which claims 4.9% per annum, and Germany, where the figure is 3.9%.
And, if UK manufacturing were to achieve a year-on-year growth rate of 3.5%, rather than an expected circa 2% growth rate for the whole economy, then output would total $488 billion by 2020, instead of just over $400 billion – currently it's $323 billion. That would be well ahead of France and about the same as Italy, were those two countries' manufacturing sectors to grow only at 2% per annum. Germany is almost $1 trillion in 2020 at that growth rate, however.
On exports, by almost doubling the current growth rate of 4.8% for manufactured goods, we could move beyond the OECD average, ahead of France (6.8%), Italy (5.7%) and the USA (7.8%), but still behind Germany (10.3%), which itself is well behind China.
To make these three objectives reality, the report cites 14 key actions, split 5, 5, 4 between productivity, innovation leadership and export growth.
