THE beginning of the year, and even more so the period after Christmas and just before new year, is full of predictions about the future, and usually doom laden ones.

I recall, a couple of years ago, being assured that the world would end in 2012 because the ancient Mayan calendar, which ran for 5,000 years, ended abruptly in that year.

There is even a Coffee Table Book of Doom. Here is a taste of its promotional blurb: “The Coffee Table Book of Doom is a revelatory, brilliantly funny, superbly illustrated and erudite compendium of all the 27 doom-laden horsemen we need to worry about – personal doom, gender erosion, asteroid impact, pandemics, super storms, sexual ruin...”

I can’t speak for all 27 doom laden horsemen, but at least the prospect of being vaporised in a nanosecond by an asteroid is less likely than the book suggested: a NASA study has downgraded the asteroid threat to our planet; apparently there are only half as many threatening asteroids than was previously thought.

This year, however, there are some more optimistic predictions about. The Centre for Economics and Business Research predicts that Britain will overtake Germany and France to become the biggest economy in Europe by 2030.

This should not be too surprising; we were after all the biggest economy in the world for quite some time.

Some economists argue that we lost our dominant position after the war because we failed to invest in our manufacturing base, relying instead on our pre-eminence in financial services.

I’ve never been persuaded by this.

Britain remains the eighth largest manufacturing economy in the world. If you take high-tech manufacturing then we are right at the top. In any event, our dominance in manufacturing was always somewhat overstated. Even when we were the ‘workshop of the world’ we never ran a surplus on our balance of trade in manufactures.

So how reliable is the centre’s prediction and what does it amount to? Although Germany has been dominant for decades, both it and France remain part of the eurozone, the long term problems of which have still to be addressed. Germany’s population is ageing and shrinking. France is travelling in completely the wrong direction, making itself increasingly uncompetitive, with restrictive labour practices and a bloated and featherbedded state sector. So measuring ourselves against these countries in the long termis missing the point.We need to measure ourselves against the emerging economies of the world - India, Brazil, and the increasingly dominant China.

We need to sell more into these markets and compete with them. If we are to do this successfully we must start by living within our means by eliminating the structural deficit in our public finances. It means making our industries more competitive with a highly educated, skilled, and dedicated workforce - we need more mathematicians, physicists, scientists and engineers.

This will require education reform to deliver the knowledge and skills, and welfare reform because we simply can no longer afford for so many of our working age population to be reliant on benefits while industry imports the educated and skilled labour that it can’t get here.

These processes of reform have all begun and are well under way. The key issue is whether we will have the will to stick with them beyond the lifetime of one parliament. It is within our own power to decide whether we keep up with the emerging new economic powers, or whether we drift down in long term decline: it’s down to us, not fate; we can choose doom, if we really want it.