Friday newspaper round-up: National Express, Southend airport, pensions

(Sharecast News) - More than 3,000 National Express bus drivers in the West Midlands have voted to strike over pay, starting on 16 March, the same day as the next RMT train strike. The Unite union said members voted 96% in favour of industrial action, on a turnout of 72%. The workers will begin "all-out continuous" strike action on Thursday 16 March, the union said, with industrial action to carry on until the dispute is resolved. - Guardian Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz declared almost a decade ago that 2014 "was the last year in which the United States could claim to be the world's largest economic power." It was, he claimed, the start of the "Chinese century". He was wrong: the US remains the world's largest economy. Yet experts keep predicting that China will soon become the preeminent global superpower, now believing that China's GDP will overtake America in the late 2030s. - Telegraph

Hooking up millions of electric vehicles, heat pumps and other devices to the UK's electricity grid could save up to £4.7bn a year by the end of this decade, the energy watchdog has predicted. Ofgem on Thursday set out proposals for how the electricity grid of the future could work, using technology to ensure infrastructure is used as efficiently as possible. - Telegraph

Esken, the listed company spun out of the old Eddie Stobart trucking business that plans to create a sixth London airport at Southend, has announced that it is to sell the empty site as well as other assets. The former Stobart Group changed its name to Esken, which means "arise" in old English, in an attempt to get away from a controversial past punctuated by High Court litigation. - The Times

An ambitious state-backed project intended to enable everyone in Britain to see all their pension arrangements on one screen has been delayed because of the complexity of connecting the first pension schemes. The government said yesterday that "additional time" was needed for pensions providers to meet the deadline of August 31 to connect to the central computer system of the "pensions dashboard programme". - The Times