Tim MacIntyre-Bhatty, Dean of the Business School, University of Wales, Newport, brings you his month column

This month I am interested to see the global movements linking land usage and economic development, and the imperatives it provides for current and future economic and skills development in Wales.

In March it was reported that Dubai World (state-owned) was looking at bidding for three premier Scottish Golf courses. Far from being unsatisfied with its own continuing growth and development in the desert surrounding Dubai, the Emirate is linking its tourism and business trade with the tourism and leisure activities of its expatriate communities, and the social networks of those communities.

This global horizontal integration may provide some lessons for the Welsh economy as we currently focus on skills development (Leitch Report, and WAG consultation document Skills That Work for Wales') when considering a competitive and sustainable economy.

All the tourism and trade of Dubai is built out of and housed from the products of the construction industry and land development, a theme which is paralleled in Wales. Although unlike Dubai we do not currently use one third of the world's cranes (yet?), construction is an increasingly important sector given the development and regeneration of Welsh communities and cities.

Ally the construction drive to the recently reported population prediction for the UK (to double to 120 million by 2050) and the sector takes on a significance all its own. In order to become and remain competitive as an economy, the population must be housed and all supporting infrastructure at least sufficient, and in addition to the need to reduce carbon footprints.

Such development requires huge scale planning, social and development consideration from the public sector, architecture, civil construction, telecommunications and infrastructure development, and technological advances not to mention effective management and leadership of all such.

There will be a need for tranches of highly-skilled and developed leaders and managers to bring such development to bear.

We must therefore invest significantly in higher skills development within Wales in order to ensure we are well placed to capitalise on such opportunities for higher skilled employment, and the resultant positive economic multiplier effect of internalising these higher wages and the spending of these wages within Wales.

This is not to detract from the clear need to invest resource into basic skills development within communities, but to realise that this is not substitutory for higher level skill development given that demographics show more than 70 per cent of the 2020 workforce are already within the workforce.