Business confidence has jumped to an 18-month high, but companies are having trouble recruiting skilled workers, according to a survey.
 
The Lloyds Bank Business in Britain report's confidence index rose to 24% - double the level immediately following the EU referendum last year.
 
The index is a measure of expected sales, orders and profits.
 
A separate survey by the British Chambers of Commerce forecast weak economic growth for the next few years.
Outlook 'mixed'

Dans un premier temps, ne donnez pas la fiche aux apprenants et ne leur dites pas sur quelle spécialité
gastronomique portera la vidéo. Faites-les discuter à partir des questions suivantes

Classes de même nationalité. Quel est le plat de votre pays que vous préférez ? Expliquez pourquoi.
Comparez avec les préférences des autres et établissezle classement des plats préférés de la classe.

Tous apprenants. Citez des plats français ou réputés en France et que vous connaissez. Chacun imagine
quels plats les Français préfèrent et vous essayez de deviner le palmarès des trois plats préférés des
Français.

Certaines cultures étrangères ont-elles également influencé celle de votre pays ? Qu’en pensez-vous ?
Expliquez. Existe-t-il d’autres spécialités étrangères que vous auriez envie de voir se développer chez vous ?

D'une part, le Brexit va amputer l'Union de la contribution britannique, soit 10 milliards à 11 milliards d'euros par an.  

« Le trou total pourrait donc être jusqu'à deux fois plus élevé » que celui laissé par le Brexit, résume le commissaire allemand.
 

“We won’t have the UK with us any more, but they were net payers despite the Thatcher rebate, so we will have a gap of €10bn-€11bn a year,” the German official said.
 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2 [...] mmissioner

Royaume-Uni : pourquoi l'accord parlementaire provoque l'ire des Gallois et des Ecossais

“We won’t have the UK with us any more, but they were net payers despite the Thatcher rebate, so we will have a gap of €10bn-€11bn a year,” the German official said.

It would not, however, take a substantial effect on future national income to
offset this immediate £8 billion gain to the public finances. A fall in national
income of just 0.6% relative to what it would otherwise have been would be
enough. There is a wide range of estimates of both the short- and long-run effects
of a Brexit on national income. The vast majority suggest a negative effect
substantially in excess of 0.6% of national income.
 
In the short run, this negative effect is largely driven by an increase in
uncertainty leading to a reduction in investment, lower consumer spending, falls
in asset values and a hit to the exchange rate. In the longer run, more expensive
trade with the EU – much our biggest trade partner – is generally modelled as the
largest contributor to reduced national income, though a fall in foreign direct
investment (FDI) could also be important. The scale of the long-run hit will
depend on what trade arrangements we reach and the extent to which any
reduced trade flows feed through into reduced productivity. Some reduction in
regulation could have an offsetting effect, though most estimates are for this to be
relatively small. In any case, such effects would depend on future political
decisions, which are hard to forecast.
 
Looking at the short term, and in particular out to 2019–20, which is the year in
which we are supposed to reach budget surplus, forecasts for the effect of Brexit
range from a reduction in GDP of 6% to an estimate from ‘Economists for Brexit’
of an increase in GDP of 1.6% – though the latter is an outlier in having a positive
effect. The estimates of NIESR for a GDP hit of between 2.1% and 3.5% probably
provide a good central range for the likely impact on GDP in 2019. Including the
direct benefits of reduced budget contributions, these would lead to the public
finances being between about £20 billion and £40 billion less healthy than in a
scenario in which we did not leave the EU. Of course, the effects could be different
from that and NIESR is explicit that most risk is on the downside – i.e. the hit to  
 
GDP is more likely to be bigger than in the pessimistic scenario than it is to be
smaller than in the optimistic scenario.
How a government would react to this is uncertain. It is possible – though in our
judgement unlikely – that a further £20–40 billion of spending cuts or tax rises
would be implemented in years up to 2019–20 in an effort to keep the public
finances on track for the currently predicted £10 billion surplus. This would be
both difficult to achieve and unlikely to be appropriate in a period of weak
economic performance. Even restoring just a budget surplus would, under the
most optimistic scenario, be far from easy – for example, this would require an
additional fiscal tightening equivalent to increasing the cuts to day-to-day
spending by central government on public services planned for this parliament
by 40%, and increasing the planned cuts to social security by 40%, alongside a
£5 billion net tax rise. Perhaps more likely would be to extend the period of
‘austerity’ into the next parliament and identify tax rises or public spending cuts
then. In the more optimistic scenario, roughly an additional year of cuts at the
same rate as we have experienced over this decade would get us back to budget
balance. In the more pessimistic scenario, an additional two years would be
required. Another alternative would be simply to live with higher borrowing and
higher debt for a longer period.
 
This raises the question as to whether these are big changes. If we turned out to
have a £20–40 billion hit to the public finances, that would certainly be much
smaller than the effect of the 2008 recession, which hit the public finances to the
tune of around £175 billion. Indeed, it would be below the downgrades to the
forecasts made by the OBR between the Budgets of March 2011 and March 2013
(estimated at £43 billion). We have coped with those. On the other hand, we start
from a position of having a greater level of public sector net debt and, having
already done several years of spending cuts, less scope to cut public spending
with relatively little pain.
 
In the longer term, the way to think about the public finance effects of a lower
growth trajectory is a bit different. Assuming we want to keep public spending at
around the same proportion of national income into the future as it is currently
planned to be in 2019–20, then one would expect public spending, on neutral
assumptions, simply to follow the path of the economy. This, to borrow the
language that Mr Osborne used as shadow Chancellor prior to the financial crisis,
would be one way of sharing the proceeds of growth between additional public
spending and additional private consumption. If the economy, and private
earnings and consumption, are bigger then in general we see that public spending
is also bigger, and hence the quality of public services is greater. The reverse is
true when the economy is smaller. Over the longer term, the scenarios modelled
by NIESR suggest reductions in national income ranging from 1.8% to 7.8%. After
accounting for reduced spending on financial contributions to the EU, these falls
in national income would reduce the amount available to be spent publicly by
between £7 billion and £48 billion a year

L'accord commercial avec le Japon (JEFTA) doit être conclu ce we et annonce lors du G20. Totale opacité de la Commission sur le sujet

Negotiating
Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates) since 1990, negotiations are suspended since 2008
Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela) since 2000, relaunched in May 2010
India Negotiations initiated in 2007 on EU-India Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement are stalled as of March 2015.[68][69][70]
ASEAN countries:
Indonesia since September 2016
Malaysia since October 2010
Thailand since March 2013
Philippines since December 2015
Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area negotiations:
Morocco since March 2013
Tunisia since October 2015
Japan (Japan–EU relations) since March 2013
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) (United States–EU relations) since July 2013
New Zealand since October 2015[71]

EU Free trade agreements
  European Union => bleu
  Agreement in force => vert foncé
  Agreement (in part) provisionally applied => vert clair
  Agreement signed, but not applied => orange
  Agreement initialed, not signed => rose
  Agreement being negotiated => jaune

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40400214
Business confidence on the up, Lloyds survey finds
 
(...)
According to the survey, four out of six business sectors reported higher levels of confidence since January.
That was attributed mainly to increased demand from UK customers, which Lloyds said suggested was due to factors other than the help that weaker sterling had given to exporters.

"Inflation fears

Meanwhile, the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) says that economic growth will remain anaemic over the next few years.

The business group, which represents thousands of small and medium-sized companies, says annual GDP growth will not exceed 1.5% by 2020 and inflation could end up being higher than expected.

The BCC expects inflation to average 2.9% this year and peak at 3.4% in the last three months of 2017, which it says will hit consumer spending.

The group raised its forecast for economic growth from 1.4% to 1.5% for this year, but expected GDP to increase by just 1.3% next year.

Adam Marshall, director-general of the BCC, said: "Over recent months, many of the businesses I speak to have expressed cautious optimism for their own prospects, but remain wary about the growth prospects of the UK economy as a whole.
"In the wake of an inconclusive general election, that wariness is set to increase."
"