From the Chief Executive
Professor Stephane Garelli from the IMD’s World Competitiveness Centre in Switzerland has released a great short online video that lasts a little over three minutes.
In it he succinctly summarises his thoughts on How to Make a Competitive Nation, something that is very topical in Australia at the moment given the debate about the future of Australia’s economy and both the Government and Opposition looking at how to encourage high technology innovative industries inthis country.
Based on his years of research into international competitiveness at the IMD, Professor Garelli highlights five things that nations need to do to be competitive:
- Rules on public finance – have good rules and constraints on public finance to enforce balanced budget finance
- Make things – a country has to make things and have industries that produce productive goods and services
- Export – countries that succeed are ones that export and earn income
- Diversify your economy – the very competitive nations in the world are very diversified, like Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark
- Develop medium sized enterprises – many countries have large companies at the top and lots of small companies at the bottom, but developing medium sized companies develops depth in the corporate sector.
For Australia, this video, by an international expert, points to a few strategies policy makers and politicians could look at to help ensure Australia maintains its current economic position and consolidates its competitiveness for the long-term future if and when the resources boom ends.
While Australia stacks up pretty well internationally, on some of these measures Australia arguably could improve, in areas such as diversifying our economy and improving the environment for growing small enterprises into medium sized companies.
As I’ve said previously, Australia’s medicines industry can actually help in this task in diversifying our economy. We already export almost $4 billion a year in medicines to countries around the world, more than the car and wine industries, and we are an industry that makes things here in Australia, be it vaccines, medicinal opiates, influenza medicines, ingredients for cancer medicines or asthma medicines.
But we can do more. We have the potential to do as countries like Switzerland have done, and use the medicines industry to diversify our economy into more high technology products and services and build our innovation and export base. What we need is a strategy to develop Australia’s innovative industrial sector and have the medicines industry feature as a key part of that.
Page updated: April 2012