The national employer association the Australian Industry Group (Ai Group) has today released its annual survey of CEO expectations and plans for 2022.
Ai Group Chief Executive Innes Willox said: "On balance Australia's business leaders are cautiously hopeful that 2022 will be a year of improved business conditions, moderate growth, and further employment creation.
"It is clear from the responses we received to our CEO survey from 346 business leaders that they are expecting their businesses to face fresh disruptions from COVID-19 in 2022. Businesses are moving to a 'living with COVID' footing after two years during which, as a nation, we bought time by isolating and then vaccinating ourselves.
"Business leaders expect to face additional supply chain interruptions and challenges as well as intensifying skill shortages across a wide range of occupations. In a federal election year, they will also be dealing with policy uncertainties.
"CEOs are expecting a continuation this year of the input cost pressures they experienced in 2021. As we discuss in the report, these expectations and their expectations of being able to pass some of these higher costs on to customers, puts business leaders at odds with the relatively benign inflation outlook anticipated by the official economic agencies. The inflation outlook is clearly a key area to watch over coming months.
"The cautious hopefulness of business leaders comes despite the seriousness of the disruptions they anticipate will characterise 2022 and is a vote of confidence in the strategies and investment priorities they anticipate deploying.
"Our report identifies that CEOs are particularly focused on five interrelated areas:
"As we suggest in our report, these strategies and investment priorities are critical to our success as a country in transitioning to living with COVID and they are also positive directions for our nation's successes in the longer-term. However, in view of the magnitude of the longer-term challenges – in particular, the well-entrenched deficiencies in productivity growth and business investment, it is clear that much needs to be done. In a federal election year, it is timely to point to the importance of our political leaders giving these underlying challenges the attention they deserve," Mr Willox said.
Key Findings
The full Ai Group CEO Survey is available here.
It is based on responses from the CEOs of 346 private-sector businesses across Australia in October 2021. Together, these businesses employed 119,827 people (378 people in each business on average) and had an aggregate annual turnover of around $74 billion in 2021. All Australian states and all major non-farm private-sector industries are represented in this year's CEO survey.
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