Trade figures released this morning showed that the UK's trade in goods deficit was unchanged between February and March.

Hopes are rising that GM Europe will soon announce a 'reprieve' for its Ellesmere Port plant, after gaining support from the UK government on new model launches and supply chain efficiencies as well as concessions from workers on wages and flexible working.

GM Europe had earlier announced it was looking to cut up to 400,000 units of capacity a year from its European operations from 2014 (when its current deal with unions expires), with the firm suggesting that Ellesmere Port and Bochum in Germany were the most vulnerable.

That enabled the firm to kick off a fresh round of its well-honed divide-and-rule strategy, pitting plants and governments against each other in a bidding war to offer the most concessions to the firm. It's a typical feature of the auto industry, controlled as it is a in a top-down way by giant, mobile 'original equipment manufacturers' (OEMs) keen to screw down costs by playing off sites against each other.

In my own research into quality management I, like many others, was intrigued by the apparent dominance of Japanese companies.

All the studies I came across in the early 1990s emphasised the importance of understanding how Japanese companies had successfully learned the lessons of implementing improvement based on teamwork, using statistical process control, obsession with customer satisfaction and constant development of products and service through innovation.

The lexicon of management started to include expressions such as excellence and the quest to become 'World Class'. Significantly, commentators acknowledged, as far as the latter was concerned, it was Japanese companies that dominated any list of the top companies.

The message to others was that you must get better or get beaten and that Japanese companies had cracked the secret of success.

Recent announcements by two Japanese companies, Toyota and Sony, show that success is never permanent and that you have to work hard to remain 'the best'.

In the case of Toyota there is a belief that after a number of recent crises it is well on the road to recovery and will continue to be regarded as one of the world's most successful car makers.

However, Sony's misfortunes seem to be continuing and it has just announced record losses. Sony has discovered that the dominance it once enjoyed has gone and that competitors are outpacing it in terms of innovation and excellence.

What has gone wrong and what does it tell us about the relevance of Japanese management techniques that were once proposed as a sure-fire way to achieve success?

Given the current sluggish nature of the economy we need to pull on every possible lever to try to promote economic growth. One of the key aspects of this is ensuring that our workforce is fit and healthy, that people are in work and their skills are being fully utilised.

The coalition government's £1.4 billion Regional growth Fund has been severely criticised in a damning report (read here) by the National Audit Office (NAO). The report states that the RGF has failed to achieve value for money, spending as much as £200,000 generating a single job. And of particular concern the NAO notes that the RGF could have created thousands more jobs if the government had applied tighter controls.

Deputy PM Nick Clegg had previously claimed the fund could generate up to half a million jobs. I'd still like to see the calculations behind his claim as that figure is wildly out-of-line with the NAO's estimates. While the RGF may create 328,000 jobs in total, these are of various durations and the NAO estimates that only 41,000 extra full-time equivalent jobs could be created over the next seven years as a result of the RGF, at an average cost of £33,000 per net additional job (which is "broadly similar" to past programmes with comparable objectives).

Ever since the financial crisis began to subside the debate has raged about how we grow our economy based on manufacturing and trade. As many companies in the West Midlands will tell you, this is nothing new and they have been quietly exporting their way around the globe way before the need to find a new economic model began.

Benjamin Disraeli is reported to have coined the phrase 'lies, damned lies and statistics'. Last week's GDP figures certainly attracted plenty of attention and, criticism in some quarters for confirming the UK is supposedly back in recession, when a raft of business surveys, including EEF's have painted a rather more positive picture.

Did the Budget set out a vision for the UK Economy ? The short answer is no. We needed a Budget last month that focused on setting out the ambitions for growth. Where does the Chancellor see the British economy heading by 2015 or beyond?

While some media reports last week whipped up talk of plant closures being announced by GM, we shouldn't have expected to hear any specific news about actual plant closures. Rather, it was the start of a process that involves three key elements as GM attempts to reduce its costs.

Those elements are: 1. capacity reduction (closing plants to you and me); 2. shifting production outside of western Europe; and 3. playing plants and workers off against each other to secure cost reductions even in those plants remaining open.

There were mixed reports today on what is unfolding in GM Europe. One set of reports suggests that the outlines of a cost-cutting plan could be presented to GM Europe's board next Wednesday, while others suggest this is premature.

What seems clear is that GM Europe is looking to take out around a third of its 1.5 million units of capacity in Europe, and that may well involve the closure of two assembly plants - although CEO Karl-Friedrich Stracke recently stated that he would honour a two-year old agreement not to shut any plans before the end of 2014.

He also stated that the firm's plants were operating at only 80 percent capacity (some would say even lower). Such spare capacity is a killer for the industry as it means a failure to achieve economies of scale in assembly, meaning higher costs.