News:  WEF praises Competitiveness Support Fund
Name of NewsPaper: The News
Date of Publication: 25, June, 2008
URL: http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=120404

By Our Correspondent

ISLAMABAD: The World Economic Forum (WEF) East Asia conference, held in Kuala Lumpur, has praised the Competitiveness Support Fund, a joint initiative of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ministry of Finance.

The WEF, in partnership with CSF, started Executive Opinion Survey 2008 in Pakistan at the beginning of January this year. The CSF strategy was based on engaging students from leading business schools and other academic institutes to carry out the survey throughout the country, said a press release issued by the CSF on Tuesday.

As part of carrying out a successful survey, the CSF identified language as one of the major impediments to getting right data from the business community, especially from the small and medium-sized enterprises. The Fund proposed to the WEF last year that survey forms should be in Pakistan’s national language ‘Urdu’ as well. This has resulted in a 35 per cent increase in response rate of the survey in 2007-08 as compared to 9 per cent in 2006-07.

The CSF also engaged BrightSpyre, the pioneer online recruitment and human resource management company in Pakistan, to link the exercise with future jobs for students as well as their capacity building for interacting with top CEOs in the country.

The Fund also organised various awareness seminars at selected institutes across the country. Interaction with the academia was focused on issues related to competitiveness and growth of economy as well as importance of human resource capacity building.

These sessions were carried out with the aim of creating more awareness of the Global Competitiveness Index, its 12 pillars and also preparing the students for presenting the survey to the top management of the country and carry out interviews with maximum output, adding more value to the importance of data collection.

More than 230 top-level business executives were surveyed by students from leading universities and business schools to get their opinion on the business environment in which they operate.

The Fund also engaged the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Higher Education Commission, Pakistan Business Council and leading academic institutions.

The Executive Opinion Survey, ‘The Voice of the Business Community’ is a major component of the Global Competitiveness Report and provides the key ingredient that turns the report into a representative annual measure of a nation’s economic environment and its ability to achieve sustained growth.

The report has been WEF’s flagship publication since 1979 and is widely recognised as the world’s leading cross-country comparison of factors affecting economic competitiveness and growth.