State minister for Finance Omar Ayub Khan has said Pakistan was fully implementing all the fundamentals of economy to become a competitive and prudent in today's challenging world. He expressed these views while addressing a conference here. Linking finance to innovation and competitiveness is the basic theme of the conference.
Omar Ayub Khan said Pakistan's Competitiveness Support Fund (CSF) was a benchmark exercise that identified a gap in it's efforts to become more competitive and innovative to face the challenges upfront. He added that CSF serves Pakistan as a vehicle to finance and support interventions that drive innovation driven long-term economic growth.
He maintained that CSF is an autonomous albeit under the umbrella of the Ministry of Finance run by the professionals on a purely private sector basis without interference in its decision making.
According to the state minister, its content and structure was based on international best practices found in more successful competitive economies (CSF) India, Thailand, Turkey, Ireland, Finland and many other countries. However, it was tailored to Pakistan's socio-economic environment.
The conference was told that USAID has formally agreed to a financial contribution around 12 million for the fund in initial three years and other donors have indicated strong interest to join with similar amounts. All donor contributions will be matched with the government of Pakistan funding.
The CSF is platform forming public/private partnership to promote cluster development, establish linkages between academia and industry encourage formation of innovative business incubator programmes, promote knowledge based enterprise development, create better jobs and boost economic growth. In this context, the CSF will also carry out policy relevant analysis for competitiveness, including the state of Pakistan's competitiveness reports.
CSF will support pilot projects both those generated through the Pakistan initiative for strategic development and competitiveness project and other projects that contribute to advance good strategy; make a sector more competitive; and help the producer and the value chain to obtain better value and better prices at each point in that chain, contributing to poverty alleviation and more income for producers. The fund would become one of the key instruments in Pakistan to support.
The fund will contribute to promoting and speeding up the process to bridge existing competitiveness gaps and catch-up with respect to the progress made in other successful economies and in the more advanced countries in the region.
Its primary objectives included promotion of knowledge-based enterprise start-ups, increase productivity of the country's enterprises, enhanced quality of services, create new and better job opportunities and reinforce innovation-driven economic growth.