Hamish McRae

Hamish McRae is a London-based economic journalist.  He is author of the acclaimed work on the future The World in 2020: Power, Culture and Prosperity first published in 1994 and translated into more than a dozen languages.  Since the publication of The World in 2020, he has been in demand world-wide as a speaker on the future. He is also the principal economic commentator for The Independent and The Independent on Sunday, a regular broadcaster on BBC radio, and a visiting professor at the School of Management of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).

Mr. McRae was educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh and took an honours degree in Economics and Political Science at Trinity College, Dublin. He was deputy editor of The Banker and editor of Euromoney before becoming financial editor of The Guardian in 1975. In 1989 he moved to The Independent where he is now associate editor.

His books include Capital City - London as a Financial Centre, co-authored with Frances Cairncross, and Wake-up Japan, co-authored with Tadashi Nakamae. Awards include Financial Journalist of the Year in 1979, a special merit award in the first Amex Bank essay awards in 1987, and in 1996 Columnist of the Year in the Periodical Publisher's Awards. He is a director of The Income and Growth Trust..

Mr. McRae's Topics Include:
The World in 2020 - Power, Culture and Prosperity

Can we talk sensibly about the future - particularly since so many predictions of the future have proved wildly inaccurate?  Yes, we can because it is possible to identify forces that will change the world over the next generation, and within broad limits to see what implications these have for the business world.

Key drivers of change in the world economy are:

-Demography--how many more people there will be in the world, how old they will be, and where they will be located
-Resources and the environment--whether there will be enough resources to give these additional people a decent lifestyle, the pressures this will create, and the impact on the financial community
-Globalisation--how long it will continue to race onwards and how it will change its nature from emphasis on international trade to emphasis on culture and intellect
-Technology--how we can see an outline of the technologies which will dominate for the next 25 years and the broad social impact of these is more important (and in some ways easier to see) than the precise technical advances
-Government and social change--why we will ask different things of government and why government will tend to retreat (for example in services such as pensions) ; where we can catch a glimpse of the big changes in our societies that will be associated with this retreat
-The End of Inflation--why a world of price stability, maybe deflation, will put different disciplines on investors and company managers as well as encouraging all of us to rethink our values and our life strategies.

These changes will have a profound impact on the entire world community. The direct impact will vary from group to group and region to region. For example, for the world of international investment, the changing global demography and the impact of deflation are perhaps the two most important drivers of change. For European financial services it will be the evolution of private funded pensions and personal direct investment in shares. For the communications industries and for retailing the falling costs of new technology and the social impact of these are of seismic importance. For governments and for commerce, the change in the nature of the frontier between public and private sector will be a key driver shaping the activities of both organisations. Finally, we can expect societies to develop increased self-reliance as the ability of the state to provide an adequate social security net is cut back.

Regionally, the impact will be very different on the present developed world, the newly developed world, and the parts which will only develop slowly over the next generation. Thus the developed world will (amongst other things) have to come to terms with its ageing population; the rapidly-developing countries will have to divert more of their resources towards social and environmental goals; and the entire world will have to try to ensure a decent life for people in countries which, for various reasons, will develop slowly.

Each presentation is tailored to the interests of the audience. Thus for the property industry particular attention is devoted to the impact on economic growth of populations ageing at different rates, at the different demands that technological change will place on physical structures (the office as a club, the home as a factory, etc) and the implications of a world of low interest rates and zero inflation. But it also tries more generally to explain the big changes taking place elsewhere in the world and so reaches beyond just the property market. It is sensitive to national differences of culture and taste and seeks to give a world view, rather than an Anglo-Celtic or London one.

The presentation brings out the way in which the changes we know are likely to take place will affect the audience, and how they should plan to meet these challenges. It also looks at the areas where change is so rapid and/or so uncertain that the best strategy is to plan to be nimble, so that when the unexpected happens people are ready to take advantage of the favourable changes--and duck the less favourable ones!