ISLAMABAD: The Word Economic Forum (WEF) and the Competitiveness Support Fund (CSF) will be working together to develop a new analytical framework to measure the impact of sustainability on economic competitiveness in Pakistan.
The WEF and its partner organization in Pakistan CSF would develop Sustainable Competitiveness Index (SCI) to highlight factors that could represent vulnerabilities to national competitiveness and productivity in future.
"Through its flagship Global Competitiveness Report, World Economic Forum has over the course of the last three decades studied and measured the drivers of national competitiveness, including a wide range of factors such as governance, infrastructure, education, innovation and proper functioning of markets," CSF Chief Executive Officer, Shahab Khawaja said.
To supplement this traditional analysis, the new index accounts for elements required to make competitiveness sustainable over the longer run, in economic, social and environmental terms, he added.
The SCI maintains almost all of the elements already captured by the Forum's existing competitiveness work, which are important for both short and longer term objectives.
It also integrates a number of additional concepts, including social cohesion, environmental policy, resources efficiency, management of renewable resources and environmental degradation.
With the goal of contributing to the discourse about the drivers of sustainable competitiveness, and also of encouraging feedback at this early stage that can serve as input for refining and further developing the concept, CSF in cooperation with WEF decided to release the preliminary results of this evolving work in the latest edition of the Global Competitiveness Report 2011.
The SCI currently covers 100 countries, and an analysis of how the results of the Index differs from those of the traditional competitiveness ranking provides a sense of which countries are not only competitive now, but are also preparing well for their future competitiveness.
Sustainable competitiveness is a nascent area of research, and the Forum's initial work has shown that much of the data measuring the key concepts is not yet available.
It will take a multi-year effort to properly capture the concept of sustainable competitiveness through reliable indicators that can be gathered for a large number of countries.
To ensure that this issue is approached in a comprehensive way, the WEF has created a high-level Advisory Board on Sustainability and Competitiveness to provide guidance and input into the process.
The Advisory Board members are drawn from the Forum's Network of Global Agenda Councils, representing leaders from government, business, academia and civil society.
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