Islamabad, 2 October 2007 -- The Competitiveness Support Fund (CSF), a joint initiative of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ministry of Finance, Government of Pakistan, will lead a delegation to the annual The Competitiveness Institute (TCI) Global Competitiveness Conference 2007 in Portland, Oregon (U.S.) from October 8-12.

The five-day conference, co-chaired by the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department and the Portland Development Commission, will include an academic summit, industry cluster tours, keynote speakers, and breakout sessions. Nearly five hundred participants from more then 35 countries are expected at the conference that will mark TCI’s 10-year anniversary also.

Comprising senior cluster experts from public as well as private sector and leading academic institutions in Pakistan, the Pakistani delegation will be led by the Arthur Bayhan, Chief Executive Officer of the Competitiveness Support Fund (CSF), who is also Vice President for TCI’s Asia Pacific Region. “Pakistan will showcase its achievements and strategy in terms of innovation and competitiveness,” said Bayhan.

The Pakistani delegation will also visit the International Institute for Innovation Journalism (IIIJ) at Stanford University, where the delegation members will discuss opportunities and initiatives for improving the effectiveness of the program for innovation and economic reporting in Pakistan. The delegation will debate on the notion of whether innovation leads journalism or journalism leads innovation.

CSF will chair a conference session on “Competitiveness in the Islamic World” that will include presentations from Arthur Bayhan and other cluster experts from around the world. The conference theme of "Collaboration, Innovation, and Sustainability" will highlight Pakistan’s recent initiatives on improving its global competitiveness rankings.

The Competitiveness Institute (TCI) based in Barcelona/ Spain is a non-governmental organization and a global professional body with more then 700 members in 50 nations. As a worldwide network of the competitiveness experts and cluster practitioners, TCI provides resources for all triple helix, including the government, private sector and academia with exchange of ideas, know-how, experiences and best practices for sustainable economic growth for a knowledge driven economy. TCI was set up by Prof. Michael Porter of Harvard University in 1997.

Every year the Competitiveness Institute holds its annual conference in outstanding locations around the globe in one of the continents. It held its 8th annual meeting in Asia/Honk Kong, in 2005, the 9th annual meeting was held in Europe/Lyon, France in 2006. The 10th TCI annual meeting for 2007 is scheduled to be held in USA/Portland, Oregon, which follows in with Cape Town in 2008 and followed in Leipzig, Germany in 2009.

CSF became functional in May 2006 and in a short span of less then eighteen months, CSF has proved to be the most effective platform to create dialogue between the public and private sector leaders at the highest level. Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, at the launch of the State of Pakistan’s Competitiveness Report in April this year termed competitiveness as the cornerstone of Pakistan’s growth strategy.

Through the impact of CSF’s activities on supporting economic development, the Pakistan government has also included for the first time ever competitiveness into the Poverty Reduction Strategy for the next 5 years, which includes: private sector development; intensifying liberalization, deregulation, privatisation and, enhancing competitiveness and productivity, special economic zones, value-addition in agriculture and riding the globalization wave by policy reforms and capacity building and restructuring of the public sector institutions. "We view the TCI conference as a way to showcase our successes, bench mark our policies, and gain insight from experts around the world," said Bayhan.

Support for CSF is part of the $1.5 billion in aid that the U.S. is providing to Pakistan, through USAID, over five years to improve economic growth, education, health, and governance, and for earthquake reconstruction.

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