United Kingdom's mid-market proves to be a balancing act
Despite standing outside of the Eurozone and, in theory, an onlooker to the developing crisis that has engulfed it for the past two years, the UK economy has been far from immune to the effects of Europe's struggles. As the continent's third largest economy, it has, in fact, suffered worse than both France and Germany, the Eurozone's largest economies.
With the UK economy having re-entered recession in the first quarter of 2012 the debate continues to rage as to where growth and recovery will come from. The focus has swung between encouraging growth from entrepreneurs and small and micro firms through grants and a loosening of red tape, to making the country more attractive to big business through corporate tax changes and relaxing employment regulation.
Little attention, however, has been paid to the companies that fall between these groups, those that are too large to be SMEs but not yet of the scale to be considered big businesses, at least in the UK, namely, the mid-market. As UK commentators look to Germany, however, in an effort to understand the country's economic outperformance, increasingly, their attention is turning to the role played by the German "Mittelstand", a group of highly effective mid-market businesses that drive the economy. Where is the UK's "Mittelstand"?