Competitiveness: Competitiveness Support Fund and World Economic Forum to develop a New Sustainable Competitiveness Framework in Pakistan

Competitiveness: Competitiveness Support Fund and World Economic Forum to develop a New Sustainable Competitiveness Framework in Pakistan

Competitiveness Support Fund and World Economic Forum to develop a New Sustainable Competitiveness Framework in Pakistan

CSF and World Economic Forum to develop a New Sustainable Competitiveness Framework in Pakistan

As the world marks 7 billion population count, Pakistan will become the 5^th most populace country with 314 million people in 2050 from the current 177 million. Pakistan must prioritize its economic resource for a sustainable growth and economic development, Shahab Khawaja

To measure the impact of sustainability on economic competitiveness, the World Economic Forum and its partner organization in Pakistan, the Competitiveness Support Fund will be working together in developing a new analytical framework – the Sustainable Competitiveness Index (SCI). The SCI takes a long-term approach to highlight factors that could represent vulnerabilities to national competitiveness and productivity in the future.

The Competitiveness Support Fund (CSF) is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Finance, Government of Pakistan, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) established to reposition Pakistan’s Economy on global competitive footing.

Shahab Khawaja, Chief Executive Officer of CSF said, “through its flagship Global Competitiveness Report, World Economic Forum has over the course of the last three decades studied and measured the drivers of national competitiveness, including a wide range of factors such as governance, infrastructure, education, innovation and proper functioning of markets. To supplement this traditional analysis, the new index accounts for elements required to make competitiveness sustainable over the longer run, in economic, social and environmental terms”.

With this new methodology, Pakistan can actually lose 3 to 9 positions on its current position from 118 on the Global Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum, Shahab Khawaja added.

The recent events in the last few years have indicated that Pakistan needs to put more focus on its sustainable development efforts, according to analysts, the SCI is extremely important for Pakistan, as it will provide the Government of Pakistan an overview on its long-term sustainable development initiatives.

According to CSF, poor institutional water and disaster management capacity in Pakistan are key indicators which will be addressed by the SCI as its sub-indices focuses on the access to improved drinking water, forest cover change and water stress index.

The SCI maintains almost all of the elements already captured by the Forum’s existing competitiveness work, which are important for both short and longer term objectives, but it also integrates a number of additional concepts, including social cohesion, environmental policy, resources efficiency, management of renewable resources and environmental degradation.

With the goal of contributing to the discourse about the drivers of sustainable competitiveness, and also of encouraging feedback at this early stage that can serve as input for refining and further developing the concept, CSF in cooperation with WEF decided to release the preliminary results of this evolving work in the latest edition of the Global Competitiveness Report 2011.

The SCI currently covers 100 countries, and an analysis of how the results of the Index differs from those of the traditional competitiveness ranking provides a sense of which countries are not only competitive now, but are also preparing well for their future competitiveness.

Sustainable competitiveness is a nascent area of research, and the Forum’s initial work has shown that much of the data measuring the key concepts is not yet available. It will take a multi-year effort to properly capture the concept of sustainable competitiveness through reliable indicators that can be gathered for a large number of countries.

To ensure that this issue is approached in a comprehensive way, the World Economic Forum has created a high-level Advisory Board on Sustainability and Competitiveness to provide guidance and input into the process. The Advisory Board members are drawn from the Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils, representing leaders from government, business, academia and civil society.

The Competitiveness Support Fund is the partner institute in Pakistan for the Global Competitiveness Network of the World Economic Forum. As the partner institute, CSF conducts the World Economic Forum Executive Opinion Survey in Pakistan, a survey implemented globally in over 142 countries worldwide. The results of the Executive Opinion Survey are presented each year in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report.

To promote competitiveness in Pakistan, CSF disseminates the results of the Global Competitiveness Report and the rankings of Pakistan in order to identify areas where competitiveness can be improved. It also encourages dialogue and debate on competitiveness on Pakistan’s business, government and academic forums.

More EU, Dutch Aid for Pakistani Flood Victims

More EU, Dutch Aid for Pakistani Flood Victims

People pass through a flooded street in Pakistan.
The European Union and Netherlands have
increased their aid for flood victims in the country.
Photo by: Vicki Francis / DfID / CC BY-NC-ND

The European Union and Netherlands have increased their aid for flood victims in Pakistan.

For the second year in a row, Pakistan is devastated by flooding. The most recent has affected 5.4 million people.

The European Commission announced Oct. 17 that it will provide an additional €6.5 million ($8.9 million) in humanitarian assistance to the South Asian country, bringing the total EU flood aid for Pakistan this year to €104.5 million.

Meanwhile, the Netherlands has made another donation of €4 million also for Pakistani flood victims. It earlier contributed €400,000 to the International Red Cross for a similar cause.

The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Oct. 14 that it had to use money from existing programs to fund the fresh donation as all the 2011 budget for emergency assistance had been spent due partly to the famine in the Horn of Africa.


Courtesy: Devex - Eliza Villarino 

a Global Disorder

A global disorder

By Irfan Aamir

One needs to have a deep understanding of Pakistan’s current political and economic direction, which despite the looming global economic and public debt crises still appears driven more by rhetoric and random decision making rather than planning and policy. However, one may not have to undertake a deep study to understand this impasse as most numbers are disappointing and challenges appear ominously skewed against Pakistan’s economic and political managers. How dismally Pakistan has performed on many global performance indexes across the various categories of governance can be easily browsed, though it may be hard to digest.

Pakistan’s political and economic news still read no different than they did 8 years ago, with monetary deficit, dearth of foreign investment and a looming power crisis as the main highlights. Past governments as well as the one today have stood committed to address all these challenges, which is exactly what the current incumbents have been saying since they took power almost 4 years ago. Government’s domestic debt, despite the recent rather generous slash in discount rate, still looks like a fallacy about to fall and bubble ready to burst. State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) governors may come or go, but the government will continue to borrow by printing currency at the rate of a billion dollars per month and keep handing out monetary policies with 2 months shelve-lives, if not less.  Such is the adolescent treatment to things that require serious responsibility and a much higher maturity level.

On the international economic scene ‘things’ don’t look so great either, in fact they haven’t looked this grim in the recorded history of human economics. As some economists and thinkers are putting it, the only thing that looks certain is more uncertainty. “Un-known unknowns” as the former US Defence Secretary would probably love to brand this imbroglio. The inevitability of an uncertain but evident change in global economic order is kicking some serious clouds of doubts and fears, making the entire system jitterier and lacking positive sentiments.

When the global finance managers and economic leaders were able to deliver some recovery in late 2009-10, ostensibly by pressing their governments to pump in trillions of dollars and euros for interventions and bankrolling the multibillion dollar corporations in the West, many thought that the global economic crisis had been contained. Recent developments, nevertheless, indicate that ‘financial market volatility’ is here to stay for the foreseeable future. What is becoming more apparent is that the recent short-term macroeconomic or regulatory policy initiatives in a number of economies across the world, especially the West, have failed to provide the desired confidence while the planners appear sans any plans for a long-term economic growth. Is it time to scramble?

Recently released Global Agenda Survey 2011 by the World Economic Forum (WEF) only confirms the varied fears and doubts everyone has about the current unending economic uncertainty. Global Agenda Council members were asked to identify ‘the’ most important international trends and how they would impact the global economy, society and environment in the next 12-18 months. The presentation, which identifies 20 trends that can and will impact the way people do business, how societies co-exist and what the Global Agenda Council members have to say about the trends can assuredly trigger some nerves and it is about time that they did. 
Of the trends highlighted in the WEF Global Agenda Survey 2011, analysts believe many are already at work at home in Pakistan.



Public Debt Crisis and Weakening Job Market are ranked as the ‘most important’ global trends and challenges. As bizarre as the relevance may appear, in case of Pakistan both these trends are not only visible but look fairly unmanageable at this point.  A country which borrows more than it has the capacity to earn or service, and is facing a mounting debt crisis that it is scrambling to service with no donors or Friends of Pakistan around reaching for their cheque books. What is even more serious is that the economy is not producing jobs either. By the admission of the Planning Commission itself, Pakistan needs to produce 1.5 million jobs each year consistently for the next few years. The economy, however, is producing only 0.3 million by government’s own estimates.
 
Some other rather disturbing trends and challenges for the next 18 months listed high on the top ten in the Global Agenda Survey 2011 are Economic Inequality and Social Unrest, crucial areas where Pakistan has demonstrated a lower level of excellence consistently. What is as annoying is that the state in which Pakistan and its economy is today isn’t the doing of ‘enemy nations’ but mostly of those civilian leaders who allegedly want to work for the people and those military leaders who were politically elected to decide the fate of our country. Promises and unending rhetoric is the most consistent thing about a very inconsistently managed country and its leaders. The question is, how long can they continue to befool or mislead?

The writer is a Karachi-based communication consultant.

irfan.aamir@gmail.com






With the courtesy of Money Matters, The News International