Wednesday newspaper round-up: Retailers, Deliveroo, Davos

Almost three-quarters of international retailers are choosing to expand outside of the UK because of this country’s burdensome and complex business rates system, fresh figures have shown. The findings come at a time when British firms are chastising the Government’s proposals to overhaul an appeals procedure which will limit companies’ powers to challenge incorrect business rate rises and face looming bill increases in an April revaluation. - Telegraph

Deliveroo plans to employ hundreds of new staff at a new London headquarters, trebling its current engineering headcount. The British food delivery company plans to hire 300 software and hardware engineers at an office in Canon Street this summer to work on technology such as the Deliveroo app and logistics systems. – Telegraph

Nurses, teachers and firefighters’ pay will drop by thousands of pounds in real terms by the end of the decade unless the government softens its stance on public sector salaries, the TUC has said in a new analysis. The trades union organisation calculated that midwives, teachers and social workers will see their real pay, which accounts for the impact of inflation, drop by more than £3,000 by 2020 if the government sticks to plans to limit salary increases to 1% a year. – Guardian

China’s premier, Xi Jinping, has delivered a strong defence of globalisation, serving notice to Donald Trump that Beijing will seek to usurp America’s traditional role as the champion of free trade and open markets. Xi used an hour-long address to the World Economic Forum (WEF) to take a number of sideswipes at the US president-elect, attacking Trump’s protectionist views without mentioning him by name. – Guardian

Mitsui has become the first Japanese company to join the increasingly international list of operators with their hands on the controls of Britain’s railways by buying a 40 per cent stake in the East Anglia train franchise. Its eyes, however, may be fixed firmly further down the line. Mitsui’s arrival on the British railways is likely to herald an assault by the Japanese industrial giant on the greatest prize of all: the tender later in the year to operate the trains on HS2. – The Times

A quarter of Britons expect to be better off in 2017 than last year, despite rising inflation and fears of a “hard” Brexit, according to PwC. Its consumer survey suggests that positive sentiment is marginally up on last year, when only 21 per cent of those polled expected to be better off. However, 26 per cent of those polled said that they expected conditions to worsen over the next 12 months. – The Times