Achieving Export Competitiveness

This article summarizes a paper on “Applying the Four Gears of National Export Strategy to Achieve Export Competitiveness that I wrote back in May 2012.

In the paper I emphasized the vital role of public-private partnerships in promoting the Development Perspective and noted that to produce a successful national export strategy, the public and private sectors need to be vibrant and to work in partnership to promote broad-based, dynamic, competitive exports with growing value addition that will encourage both domestic and foreign direct investment to enhance socio-economic development and poverty reduction.

I emphasized an aspect that specifically addresses the export sector’s contribution to socio-economic development, where the main issues to assess are the export sector’s contribution to employment generation, poverty reduction; enhancement of backward linkages; environmental sustainability; and finally to women’s involvement in the economy.

I concluded that the three critical networks of a national export strategy, (Trade Support Network, Services Delivery Network, and Strategy Support Network), have been successfully supportive of export competitiveness targets through effective public-private partnerships only when the developmental perspective has been given thorough considerations by the engineers of the national export strategy.

The paper also emphasized the critical role of networks’ support and services by addressing the Institutional Perspective stressing that exporters today need to compete through sound export promotion strategies. I noted that where exporters find effective export services and support networks nationally, their abilities to succeed in export markets are better and stronger.

The paper ends with nine conclusions. The ninth conclusion addresses four observations that I have made in analyzing cases of effective applications of the four gears of national export strategy to achieve export competitiveness. The four observations are related to “State-Level Export Competitiveness”, “State-Level Branding”, “Regional-Level Export Competitiveness”, and “Regional Export Networks”.

I concluded that a successful application of the four gears of national export strategy after giving the socio-economic perspective its considerations, is supportive of national export competitiveness only when exporters are helped and provided with various trade and export support services.

The main paper (in 7 pages) comes with a reference paper (in 10 pages) providing references to three information resources:

• Sector-Level Strategies, (Excerpts from “M. S. OdoomDomson and P. Richard Vlosky, 2010).
• Export Cluster Formation, (Excerpts from the ITC’s Paper on Innovations in Export Strategy, Competitiveness through export clustering, 2005).
• The Four Perspectives of National Export Strategy, (Excerpts from the JAMAICA Export Strategy, 2009).

 If you would like to read the full report feel free to email us at info@ebsi.ie and request the ‘Four Gears Report’ in the subject line. We will be happy to send you by reply.

Rasim