News: WEF suggests CSF Model of collecting soft data
Name of the Newspaper: Pakistan Observer
Date of publication: Wednesday, 25 June, 2008
Website: http://pakobserver.net/news/business04.asp

Islamabad—The Competitiveness Support Fund, a joint initiative of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ministry of Finance, was applauded at the World Economic Forum East Asia conference held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. CSF was congratulated by the WEF for introducing a pioneering strategy for conducting the Executive Opinion Survey 2008 for the Global Competitiveness Report 2008-09. The CSF strategy for the Executive Opinion Survey for 2008 was based on engaging the students from leading business schools and other academic institutes to carry out the executive opinion surveys throughout the country, said a statement issued here today.

Through this exercise, CSF, in addition to the timely submission of the survey forms, also aims at improving the data collection process in terms of both quality as well as quantity. It also resulted in creating a group of future business leaders who would be sensitized on the importance of Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), its 12 pillars and the role of business community in measuring the GCI. By engaging the academia in this exercise, CSF also aims in building the capacity of the future business leaders who will be joining the business community for the next Executive Opinion Surveys. CSF emphasized that timely submission of qualitative data is essential for improving Pakistan’s global ranking. Therefore, this initiative will also be effective in terms of when some of the students join the public sector institutions, as this will sensitize a group of public sector institution leaders, who are responsible for improving and updating the collection, as well as the timely submission of the “Hard Data” to the relevant sources from Pakistan. As part of carrying out a successful survey exercise, CSF identified language as one of the major impediment in getting the right data from the business community, especially from the small and medium sized enterprises. CSF proposed to the World Economic Forum last year that the survey forms should be in Pakistan’s national language ‘Urdu” as well. This has resulted in a 35% increase in response rate for the executive opinion surveys in 2008-2007 as compared to 9% in 2006-2007. CSF also engaged BrightSpyre, the pioneers in Online Recruitment and Human Resource Management Company in Pakistan to link this exercise with future jobs for the students as well as their capacity building for interacting with the top CEOs in Pakistan.

CSF carried out various awareness seminars at the selected institutes across the country. The interactions with the academia were focused on issues related to competitiveness and the growth of Pakistan’s economy as well as the importance of human resource capacity building. These sessions were carried out with the aim of creating more awareness on the Global Competitiveness Index, its 12 pillars and also preparing the students for presenting the EOS in front of the top management of Pakistan and carry out the survey interviews with maximum output – adding more value to the importance of the data collection. More than 230 top-level business executives operating in Pakistan were surveyed by students from Pakistan’s leading universities and business schools to capture their opinion on the business environment in which they operate. The participating students came from a vide range of academic backgrounds reflecting the most important sectors of academia. CSF has created a database of more than 100 students, who have been sensitized on the issues of global competitiveness and Pakistan’s economic environment. CSF also engaged the Federation of Pakistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries, the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, BrightSpyre, Pakistan Business Council and the leading academic institutions in Pakistan. The World Economic Forum in partnership with the Competitiveness Support Fund started the Executive Opinion Survey 2008 in Pakistan beginning of January 2008.