The Royal Wedding is for mugs

So best wishes to Kate and Will and lets all at least enjoy our day off!

Some analysts predict the wedding will boost tourism and retail sectors, putting an extra £1 billion into the economy.

Hotels are offering royal wedding packages, a brewery is offering a Kiss Me Kate beer, and jewelers big and small cannot push enough replicas of Princess Diana's sapphire and diamond engagement ring.

Among companies selling royal memorabilia - tea towels, commemorative mugs, fine bone china tea sets and Kate and William "paper doll kits" - there is great excitement, with some reporting an increase of up to 40 per cent in sales over last year, mostly to the US.

London expects more than 1 million visitors on the wedding day and up to £50 million in tourist spending. If all attend the wedding, the number would dwarf the 600,000 who lined the streets 30 years ago for the marriage of Charles and Diana.

Tomorrow's wedding is also expected to create television history, with the BBC broadcasting to about 2.5 billion viewers in the US, Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.

But while the wedding will benefit some businesses, others are not over the moon.

The problem is the timing. Each public holiday typically costs the UK economy £6bn in productivity and overtime payments, according to the Confederation of British Industry business lobby group. But the extra day off, coming between the end of Easter week and the May Day bank holiday, could mean even greater losses; for a small company, this amounts to a shutdown for the period.

Amid rising unemployment, surging inflation and brutal government austerity measures, the extra holiday could not come at a worse time, says the Federation of Small Businesses. It could even knock 1 percentage point off growth this quarter, some economists say.

"The wedding's good for people selling silly mugs but it certainly is not good for my business," says John Newman, who runs a small management company.

With many world leaders and a huge crowd attending the wedding, there are also questions over the cost of security. The government is coy about how much it has to cough up, but the security for the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana in 1981 was estimated to cost about £30m, not adjusted for inflation.

Even though the economic impact is hard to measure the feel-good factor should not be underestimated, some analysts say.

"Extraneous events can increase feelings of economic and other well-being," says Professor Stephen Lea of Exeter University, who specialises in economic psychology.

While many citizens have been directly affected by the recession or fear they will be, Prof Lea believes there are also those who are merely affected by the general sense of doom and gloom.

Good feelings triggered by the wedding could well motivate this group of people to increase their discretionary spending on items such as electronic goods and home improvements - broader consumption that could lift household spending out of the doldrums, he says.

And along with the queen's diamond jubilee and the Olympics next year, VisitBritain believes the fanfare over the wedding is set to create a "bumper couple of years" for the economy and could be the key to a £2bn tourist-driven economic boom.

And that's certainly not be bad for the economy.

Enjoy your weekend!

Happy Easter - break out the BBQ

So Happy Easter!

The UK's bonus holiday (Easter, Royal Wedding & May Day) has started, with reports of extra flights leaving for supposed hotspots overseas.

But many people will be flying off to cooler climates, with pullovers a precautionary measure in Corfu and Barcelona, while T-shirt weather continues across the British Isles.

The cooler temperatures along the north Mediterranean coast will see London comfortably hotter at 24C (75F) than Barcelona at 16C and Corfu at 17C .

In the UK, roads to the coast are getting busier, with the Met Office confident that the warm, calm spell will continue well into next week.

The Highways Agency announced the suspension of roadworks at many major sites to help holiday traffic flow, although essential repairs will continue on parts of the M1 and M25. The fire-damaged stretch of the M1 between junctions one and four in London has fully reopened.

Network Rail is optimistic about smoother journeys than last Easter, with less engineering work over the holiday and an estimated 18% more trains running. There will be disruption, however, on the West Coast line in north-west England, the Great Western line and at Liverpool Street station in London, where essential repairs and modernisation need the quieter holiday period to get work done.

Holidaymakers travelling overseas this Easter are expected to top 2 million, in spite of the recession and the balmy climate in the UK, with Amsterdam, Dublin, Paris and Rome the favourite European destinations and New York topping long-haul bookings.

Meanwhile with temperatures expected to bemore than 10c higher than the National Average at this time of the year, Homebase has reported a 20% rise in BBQ sales compared with Easter last year and that it is expecting to sell enough gas to fuel 300,000 barbeques along with enough garden chairs to fill Westminster Abbey 30x over!

Enjoy!

Economic Impact of the Royal Wedding

With the announcement of the Royal wedding next year, the press had gone into hyperbole, with many newspapers claiming that the wedding will bring an estimated £1billion bonus to the British economy.

Hold on a minute. How much? There will, we are sure, be an economic surge, due to an increase in merchandising, media spend, advertising and increased hotel and tourism revenue but it is questionable whether that money will be a direct benefit to the UK economy

If such a major event raises revenue for the taxman then it should follow that that revenue should be spent on priority areas such as housing, welfare and health, not on subsidising a wedding of two 28 year old royals.

"But it is highly questionable that the event will boost the economy and we challenge those who say it will to show their evidence."

"We see no evidence that this event will generate any more revenue than a major football fixture - so subsidising the wedding would be no more tolerable than subsidising Wayne Rooney's salary."

"The figures being bandied about by the press this morning look like a lot of wishful thinking and make-believe."

"We would in particular challenge the comments of Sandie Dawe, chief executive of VisitBritain, who has said the wedding would “be an enormous boost for tourism”. We are asking her to retract her statement that the royals generated £500m in revenues for tourism each year as her
organisation's research makes no such claim."




NOTES

According to the FT Stefan Szymanski, economics professor at London’s Cass business school, said there was little evidence of public events lifting the economy, particularly when no new infrastructure is built.

The VisitBritain report published earlier this year said that heritage tourism, not the royal family, raised £500m a year. That is tourism to do with Britain's history, not the monarchy.