Sydney's 2022 Business Needs Survey: Shifts and Insights
Oxford Economics Australia conducted a comprehensive analysis of the City of Sydney's 2022 Business Needs Survey, highlighting trends in business confidence, sector-specific recovery, changing business needs, and digital service expansion.
Project background
The City of Sydney commissioned Oxford Economics Australia to analyse the results of its 2022 Business Needs Survey. The survey, initiated in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, aimed to understand the needs of small businesses and inform initiatives to support their economic viability. In 2022, the survey revealed a surge in business confidence despite a challenging macroeconomic outlook. The City sought our expertise to contextualise these findings and help businesses identify emerging trends and challenges. The analysis also needed to account for the uneven recovery across sectors and the changing needs of businesses in a persistently uncertain environment.
Approach and solution
In response to the City of Sydney’s request to analyse the 2022 Business Needs Survey, we provided a comprehensive analysis, contextualising the survey data within the broader economic environment. The analysis revealed a significant surge in business confidence, with three out of four businesses expecting to be financially better off in a year. This positivity was more pronounced for their own businesses than for the Australian economy as a whole.
The analysis also highlighted the uneven recovery across different sectors, with office-based sectors leading the recovery while consumer-dependent sectors continued to struggle. We identified an increasing trend towards hybrid working, reducing foot traffic in the CBD, and affecting businesses reliant on consumer footfall.
The study also found changing business needs, with a decreased demand for additional business grants and a shift towards support for skilled worker recruitment and red tape reduction. The analysis also revealed that a majority of businesses had expanded their digital services, with a focus on social media marketing, customer acquisition and retention, strategic planning, and business resilience initiatives.
The report underlined that the recovery is uneven and certain sectors continue to struggle, especially those still affected by Covid-19 constraints. It also acknowledged that the businesses hardest hit by the pandemic may not have survived and hence are not represented in the survey.
Conclusion
We delivered a detailed analysis of the City of Sydney’s 2022 Business Needs Survey, revealing increased business confidence despite uneven sector recovery. The study identified a shift towards hybrid working and digital services expansion, and changing business needs, particularly around skilled worker recruitment and red tape reduction. The client benefited from these insights, enabling more targeted support for local businesses.
Get in touch
Emily Dabbs
Head of Macroeconomics Consulting, Oxford Economics
+61 2 8458 4202
Emily Dabbs
Head of Macroeconomics Consulting, Oxford Economics
Sydney, Australia
Emily leads Oxford Economics Australia’s Macro Consulting team. She has over 10 years of economic analysis and consulting experience, focusing on macroeconomic forecast and analysis. Emily regularly provides strategy support and briefings, and presentations to clients and key stakeholders to support a broader understand of the economic environment and the impact on their business.
Alex Hooper
Lead Economist
Alex Hooper
Lead Economist
Sydney, Australia
Alex has over 6 years of economic consulting experience, working with senior internal and external stakeholders to develop quantitative and qualitative approaches for a range of strategic investments and interventions across Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.
Alex has undertaken a wide range of consulting projects for the public and private sectors including the viability of major new infrastructure initiatives in transport, arts and culture; strategic analysis of new city developments; the economic and social impact of innovative investment programs and recently advising a Middle Eastern government on the impact of once in a generation fiscal reform.