Work from home.

Survey data suggest that people like working from home, which helps lower firms’ overheads and carbon emissions, but evidence on the impact on productivity is mixed. The Freespace index, which tracks office usage in big corporations worldwide, shows that occupancy is about half its 2019 levels for both workspace stations and meeting rooms. Kastle data, which tracks fob access to US offices, particularly in big professional services businesses, shows that occupancy returned to only about half of pre-pandemic levels in mid-October. A survey by Munich-based think-tank Ifo showed that in August, a quarter of employees in Germany still worked from home for at least part of the time.

In Japan, footfall was 7 per cent below pre-pandemic levels, while in the UK, it was down 24 per cent. Across major advanced economies, office trips are more popular on the middle days of the week, while Monday and Friday tend to show significant drops in attendance. According to Google figures, cities hosting financial and business districts had a more considerable loss of office footfall than other major population areas. The significant shift to working from home «presents challenges for dense urban centres that are organised to support a large volume of inward commuters and a high concentration of commercial activity», said Aksoy.

In the UK, the Office for National Statistics survey showed that more than a fifth of UK workers was using a hybrid working model in early October, essentially unchanged since the spring.

www.sba.tax

Comments

Cloud Bookkeeping

US FED rate rise.

The US Federal Reserve officials have indicated that they plan to resume increasing interest rates to control inflation in the world's biggest economy. During the June meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee reached a consensus to keep interest rates stable for the time being to evaluate whether further tightening of policy would be necessary. However, the majority of the committee anticipates that additional rate increases will be required in the future. The minutes of the meeting have recently been made public. According to the minutes, most participants believed maintaining the federal funds rate at 5 to 5.25 per cent was appropriate or acceptable, despite some individuals wanting to raise the acceleration due to slow progress in cooling inflation. Although Fed forecasts predicted a mild recession starting later in the year, policymakers faced challenges in interpreting data that showed a tight job market and only slight improvements in inflation. Additionally, officials gr...

EU business slide.

S&P Global’s flash eurozone composite purchasing managers’ index, a key gauge of business conditions for the manufacturing and services sector, fell 1 point to 47.1, figures showed yesterday. That is its lowest level since November 2020 and the fourth consecutive month below the crucial 50 mark separating growth from contraction. One of the few bright spots in the survey was that companies in all sectors reported a slight easing of cost pressures, price growth and supply chain constraints. However, prices charged for goods and services still rose at the sixth fastest rate since such data started in 2002. Jobs growth increased marginally from October but remained low compared with the past 18 months. Following a few months of falling price pressure in manufacturing and services, the October print shows an overall stabilisation said Jens Eisenschmidt, chief European economist at Morgan Stanley. However, German businesses, at the hub of Europe’s energy crisis, reported that manu...

Tariffs on UK electric cars.

The European Commission has confirmed that it will continue with its plan to impose tariffs on electric cars exported between the UK and EU starting next year. This is due to the "rules of origin" requirement that mandates EVs traded across the English Channel to have 60% of their battery and 45% of their parts sourced from the EU or UK or face a 10% tariff. A senior Commission official, Richard Szostak, recently informed parliamentarians from the UK and EU that the bloc's battery investment has significantly declined, making the tariffs necessary to encourage domestic production. In 2022, the EU's share of global investment in battery production shrank from 41% to only 2% after the US offered substantial subsidies through its Inflation Reduction Act. Starting in 2024, car manufacturers in the UK will need to have 22% of their sales come from zero-emission vehicles, which means they may need to import EVs from the continent to meet this requirement. If EU carmakers ...

Search This Blog