Background information: Today’s global economy requires increased attention to the issue of competitiveness. The need to adhere to international trade rules, combined with more rigorous consumer demands, requires businesses to work much "smarter". Critical to this is the issue of competitiveness: how does a country, institution or business differentiate itself from the competition? How does it develop competitiveness strategies? How can success be defined? What is the secret to success? Competitiveness strategies need to be:
- Innovative, drawing on best practices (How to work better and smarter?)
- Efficient, leveraging scarce resources to create a more successful business.
- Cooperative, working together to achieve success through an effective public-/private-sector dialogue.
- Inclusive, getting all those involved in the competitive process to contribute, particularly to cross-cutting issues.
A country’s competitiveness is largely contingent on how effectively government, trade support institutions and businesses interact and exchange information to ensure sustainable economic growth. The ability to "cooperate to compete" is essential at all levels of the business process.
The event will focus on improving understanding of the competitive process by targeting three key issues:
- Promoting trade competitiveness through trade promotion strategies·
- Supporting trade promotion/competitiveness
- Achieving success through competitiveness
The Kingdom of Lesotho’s Minister of Trade and Industry, Cooperatives and Marketing, Hon. Mpho Malie, will provide the keynote speech for the session, underlining the competitiveness issue from a national perspective.
Institutional partners will include INMETRO (the National Institute of Metrology, Standardization and Industrial Quality, Brazil), JAMPRO (the Jamaica Promotions Corporation) and the Foreign Economic Relations Division of Slovenia’s Ministry of the Economy. The three institutions will share their experiences, highlighting not only how these contribute to building business competitiveness but also their unique role in linking the public and private sectors.
Enterprises from Lesotho, Brazil, Jamaica and Slovenia will share their competitiveness experiences, highlighting how they have tackled international markets, what their key competitiveness issues were and how they have been able to work with their governments and trade support institutions to ensure sustainable growth. An interactive debate with questions from the floor will complement the presentations made during the session and is expected to elicit a wide range of issues related to the overall theme of the session.A session paper titled "Building Business Competitiveness in a Globalized World" is being prepared to complement the keynote speech and other presentations. Key competitiveness issues will be highlighted, in addition to case studies on competitiveness and emerging trends in global business.
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Contact: Mr. Ramamurti Badrinath, International Trade Center (ITC). E-mail: badrinath@intracen.org