The CSF is a joint initiative of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Pakistan’s ministry of finance.
The five-day international conference was organised by the Competitiveness Institute International (TCI) from October 8 to 12 to focus on economic sustainability for creating jobs..
”Competitiveness in the 57-member Islamic World is needed to diversify their resources so that they could help each other, and for this purpose the TCI will launch a first-ever Al-Madina Global Competitiveness Centre in Saudi Arabia,” TCI President Lars Eklund told Dawn after the conference.
Dr Lars said Saudi Arabia would be among the top ten in the global competitiveness index by 2010 and as such it had certain potential to become an Islamic centre for innovation, competitiveness and economic sustainability.
He said that Egypt and Bahrain were also considered for setting up such a centre but eventually everybody supported the Kingdom. This centre, he said, was also important for the Middle Eastern countries where the wealth of oil could not last for ever.
He hoped that $446 billion Saudi GDP and the kingdom substantial share in oil market would significantly contribute through the Al-Madina Centre in promoting competitiveness, innovation and economic sustainability in the Muslim World. The Centre will be set up in early 2008.
Chief executive of the CSF Arthur Bayhan told Dawn said the CSF had proposed a public-private partnership which is even needed in Saudi Arabia for generating new jobs. The objective, Mr Arthur said, was to help create knowledge-based societies.
He said that the TCI had decided to help Pakistan in economic forecasting to produce reliable data for strengthening Pakistani institutions dealing with economic development.
“Pakistan needs a reliable data which does not currently exist to re-allocate budget resources to various sectors”, the chief executive of the CSF said. And for this purpose, he said, CSF had identified sectors like motorcycles, food, horticulture, meat processing and fisheries to promote local and foreign investmen.
To another question, Mr Arthur said that for the first time, through the CSF, Pakistan government was able to include innovation and competitiveness in the Pakistan Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP-2) for next five years.
“It is a real achievement for us”, he said, adding that the USAID, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the World Bank, the European Union (EU) and the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP) have promised to offer financial and technical assistance to promote innovation and competitiveness in various economic fields.
He said for the first time a legal requirement was being fulfilled about special economic zones. “We are preparing an act about these zones to give them a legal framework which exist in other countries but not in Pakistan”, he added.
These issues, he said, were highlighted at the Oregon conference which certainly helped Pakistan to be on the international radar screen for attracting investment.
Secretary Industries and production Mr Shahab Kawaja, who represented Pakistan at the conference, said that his country would benefit from the Oregon conference in terms of improving its competitiveness and achieving economic sustainability.
Pakistan, he said, needed to compete with China and India to make its engineering sector competitive and innovative with a view to increasing exports. He agreed that Pakistan would have to further enhance its exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) with the help of CSF and other global institutes like the TCI.
He conceded that the cost of doing business in Pakistan was still high specially electricity tariff. Exports have risen from $8 billion to $18 billion, while FDI jumped from 300 million to $8 billion in a short period of time. “But we have to go a long way to achieve our major economic objectives”, he admitted.
Overall, what came out in the conference was that there are already many existing activities in the field of sustainability, but often they are not coordinated or not their existence or concrete nature is not known widely.
The participants decided to build on what already exists--- such as the Oregon Business Plan and Innovation Council--- with a focus on creating quality jobs using sustainability as a platform to accomplish the plans.
There was a general agreement that a move from talking and recognising to action was necessary and to create initiatives not institutions.
It was said that sustainability is an increasingly important issue that needed to be discussed among people in the clustering field in order to approach the potential role of clusters as an important brick in sustainable regional development.
One of the groups focused on how to create a Bioregional Capital Market and how to accelerate investment into green industries (green exchange), seeing capital as part of the solution instead as a problem.
The participants realised that the TCI conference could be a tool to improve in terms of showing their assets, getting feedback and learn how things are done in other countries.
Therefore, they said they must stress out the global aspect of sustainability and look for global best practices.
One of the groups focused on how to build a global learning platform, sharing expertise, empowering champions, promoting the cascadian values.