How does snow effect British economy?
Recently Britain has suffered almost a billion pounds loss. This happened because of the snow. The main point of this essay is to explore the reasons why the problem of snow was greater than expected. We shall look through the problems of the weather change and the effect it made on the economy by going through such aspects as: workers were forced to miss work, additional expenditure on getting the snow out of the streets, financial aid giving to elder people, and other expenditures
Demand of some firms such as cafes, restaurant, shops which sales winter seasonal clothes, cleaning companies which have snow cleaning machines and private doctors was increased because people prefer spending their money in warm cosy atmosphere. There are some positive externalities like children can play snowballs, creating snowman and sledging (fun for children). Also there will be more tourists who want to take pictures.
As I was mention before many workers couldn’t get to their job. Most of the schools were closed, because teachers couldn’t get to work. it causes negative externalities like different diseases/headaches for young/old population. Canceling railways, car, buses and airplane departures, so people couldn't get to their places on time. Snow also causes traffic jams, car crashes. So businesses such as Insurance, Finance and other businesses located in the center of London suffered greatly from problems with transport. The whole stock exchange has faced reduced activity and FTSE(financial times stock exchange) 300 has went down.
Long term effect of school closures might effect overall quality of future labour. This in
turn might slow down potential growth of the economy and make the country uncompetitive.
In conclusion the overall effects of severe weather conditions has further damaged UK's economy already affected by global financial crisis.
