In association with PwC
Conference Chair:Rob Lewis, Chairman, Wales and West, PwC
The IWA’s third annual Welsh National Economy Conference has adopted the theme of Getting Wales Moving. This year this important event in the Welsh business calendar will explore innovative plans to tap private funds to improve our infrastructure as well as the work of the new industrial sector panels set up by the Welsh Government.
Biotechnology superstar Sir Christopher Evans, will top the bill with a keynote address on enterprise and innovation and the prospects for building Wales’s life science businesses. Welsh-born Sir Christopher is credited by many as the founder of the UK’s bio-technology industry and is now Chair of the Welsh Government’s life sciences sector panel.
Welsh Government Finance Minister, Jane Hutt, will outline the prospects for raising capital to create a national infrastructure investment fund, and Dr Stevie Upton of the IWA will disclose results of the IWA’s own survey of capital spending requirements across Wales, including major projects that could be vital to our economic development.
Lord Rowe-Beddoe, former chairman of the Welsh Development Agency, who presided over the WDA during Wales’s inward investment heyday, will review the prospects for reviving inward investment.
Gerald Holtham, the economist who chaired the Holtham Commission on financing and funding the Welsh Government, will present an overview of the economic prospects for Wales and the UK.
Key figures from the new industrial sector advisory panels set up by the Welsh Government will set out their sector strategies, and Professor Richard Davies, Vice Chancellor of Swansea University, will talk about the contribution that higher education can make to business. A panel of top Welsh business people will give their views of current strategies to get Wales moving.