Today the British Government launches its Trade and Investment White Paper. This is our statement to our trade and investment partners across the world, including Hungary, about how we plan to work together for mutual benefit. It’s about:
- Maximising the opportunities for businesses in the UK to trade and invest, and attracting investment to the UK;
- Strengthening the multilateral trading system; and
- Enabling developing countries to benefit from trade and investment. (This is enlightened self-interest: failure to achieve this will cause huge problems for the developed world too.)
British Embassies throughout the world, like ours in Budapest, will play an important role in delivering this strategy. It will drive the UK’s economic recovery and help secure a strong, sustainable and open global economy. It should be win-win: a growth in global business should help open and entrepreneurial economies like Britain’s and Hungary’s to do well. History shows how protectionism may seem like a good idea but is disastrous in the long term.
This really is not, in the jargon, a zero-sum game. Which can be shown by the fact that two-way trade between Hungary and the UK is on the increase, big time – by some 30% in both directions. And although investment is very much into Hungary at the moment, we are hoping to see more Hungarian investments into the UK before too long – because, frankly, if you’re a company with global aspirations and you aren’t there in 2012 during Olympics Year, you are missing out on a huge opportunity.