A third chance for Wales to lift itself EU aid to Wales is welcome but what would really help the Welsh economy is investment in skills Action from last year's England v Wales rugby match at Twickenham The rugby triumph of the British and Irish Lions over Australia was sweet for Wales, which supplied 10 of the players. With strains of "Bread of Heaven" ringing around the stadium in Sydney, it was a boost to morale for part of the UK that faces a tough economic battle. There was more good news recently - well, sort of - when it was confirmed that Wales will get about £2bn in EU regional aid between 2014 and 2020. There had been fears it could lose up to £400m under a new formula, but the UK government diverted almost £700m from England to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, to the chagrin of Merseyside and South Yorkshire. The reason Wales is getting the money, however, is that two previous rounds totalling £3.4bn since 2000 have failed to lift it off the lower rungs of Europe's prosperity ladder. Most goes to west Wales and the Welsh Valleys, a region covering two-thirds of Wales, where economic output per head is below 75 per cent of the EU average (it went down from 75 per cent in 2000 to 70 per cent in 2010). Wales has had to cope with the decline of heavy industries coupled with a difficult, mountainous terrain. Cardiff is a bright spot, along with other bits of the southern and northern coasts, but geography makes it hard to spread prosperity. The BBC's Mark Easton recently reported from Blaenau Gwent, in the Valleys, and found little private sector work had come to replace former mining and steel jobs, despite efforts at regeneration. In an area with fewer than 60,000 adults, almost 10,000 prescriptions were issued each month for antidepressants. One school in Waundeg keeps a box of shoes for children who arrive without anything suitable on their feet. Many people there rely on food boxes delivered by a charity van. Not everywhere is so bad. Though Wales remains bottom among UK regions for output per head, its business activity rose last month in line with the UK average and better than several other regions, according to Lloyds TSB bank. Unemployment, at 8.4 per cent of the workforce, is above the 7.8 per cent UK average but below northeast England, the West Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber and London. There are questions about the effectiveness of EU regional aid, though it does go on worthy projects from robotics workshops to science and engineering skills training, high-speed broadband and flood protection. There is no magic answer: the best hope has to lie in improving skills. Zero hours dilemma The growth of "zero-hours" contracts, under which workers can be given variable amounts of work and thus little or no pay, is a justifiable cause for concern. I have known them in my own family and seen the frustrations they bring. We should keep them in perspective, though. Research by the Work Foundation think-tank has found that most workers on them do not want longer hours (only 26 per cent say they do) and only 18 per cent are looking for a different job. About a quarter of workers on such contracts are full-time students. The numbers that want more hours or a new job are about 2.5 times greater than among those not on zero-hours contracts, but the foundation says there is less dissatisfaction than would be expected if these contracts were as exploitative as has been suggested. Vince Cable, business secretary, has ordered a review into the contracts, which could lead to measures to curb abuses. The Work Foundation says there is a place for zero-hours contracts, but it should be a very small one. The challenge, it adds, is to keep the benefits of flexibility to meet variable workloads while making sure workers do not bear all the risk. The L-profession Members of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals have been complaining about a £35,000 rebranding exercise that sought to remove any references to the "L-word" ("the knowledge people" was one suggestion). Would the poet Philip Larkin, librarian at the University of Hull for 30 years, have considered himself an "information professional"? Famous librarians included Mao Zedong, who worked at Peking University, J Edgar Hoover, director of the US's Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Giacomo Casanova, who worked as librarian for Count Waldstein while writing his memoirs. If they said "shush," you would listen.