Award-winning business and economic journalist, Hamish McRae has outlined some of the challenges facing the European public sector over the next 30 years.
In his latest book The World in 2050, Mr McRae (pictured) said Public Servants would have to design plans to deal with smaller cohorts of working people supporting the rising ranks of retirees.
“What plans are needed to reform healthcare and pensions?,” Mr McRae asked.
“How should Civil Servants advise politicians about a world where China has passed the United States to become the world’s largest economy? (though by 2050, China’s star will be fading, while India’s will be rising fast),” he said.
“Politicians will lean on their Civil Servants to find answers to these tough questions.”
Mr McRae said concern about the environment threw up a string of other challenges “some of which we are aware of now, but some where we really are only feeling our way forward”.
“Of course, climate change dominates everything. Governments are also in the front line here, and the great question is whether the present actions they are taking will be sufficient to slow the juggernaut, or whether there will be some kind of discontinuity if and when it becomes clear that they are not,” the journalist said.
“Public Servants have already played a huge role in refocusing Government environmental policy, including the Stern Review in the UK in 2006, which set out the economic case for tackling climate change.
“That role will grow over the next decade.”
He said trade and finance would be transformed with the recasting of globalisation so that its benefits were retained while its costs reduced.
“We tend to forget that the great post-war institutions that facilitated the burst of prosperity from 1945 onwards — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation — were built and run by international Civil Servants,” Mr McRae said.
He said the final challenge, and perhaps the greatest of all, was governance.
“How do democratic Governments satisfy the increasing demands made on them?” Mr McRae asked.
“Even those of us, like myself, who are confident of the robust nature of the democratic system, must acknowledge that it faces a very difficult period,” he said.
“How well it comes through the next 30 years will depend on how well it meets citizens’ hopes and fears with effective action.
Mr McRae the democratic system had to “lift its game”, that the politicians were a tiny crust on top of a vast army of Public Servants.
“The lifting has to be done by that army.”
London, 27 May 2022
