Mike Redwood examines on ILM the duality of craft and efficiency in the leather industry, and the importance of holding on to leather’s status as a natural material.

The need to invest is relentless, hence we return to it frequently. No business can afford to let itself slip back in a competitive world, yet it is mentally and financially draining to invest in the face of market uncertainty and depleted cash reserves after the never-ending sequence of unexpected demands starting with Covid, then inflation and supply chain disruption.

Governments, paranoid about the implications of low or negative economic growth, are struggling to make companies invest and many of the largest businesses are giving what cash reserves they have back to investors instead.

Improving GDP is all about efficiency and getting more out of invested capital and people. Gross domestic product (GDP) is a measure of the size and health of a country’s economy. It adds up all the output generated within the borders of a country to create a monetary value of final goods and services – that is, those that are bought by the final user – produced in that country in a given period of time.

GDP can be viewed from the three aspects of production, expenditure and income, so it is quite complex and people such as Adam Smith would never have allowed a supposedly passive non-interfering service such as banking to be added in as it is now. In fact, GDP is quite a controversial measure in some circles, which think it is not the right tool to capture economies with high levels of service industries, while others think it totally false anyway. They say it only measures things that are not important and fails to measure what is important.

Increased efficiencies – to read the rest of this comment by Dr Redwood, click on Redwood Comment.