To help their countries compete in today's fast-paced,
challenging trade environment, trade strategy-makers have to be
broader in their outlook and more encompassing in their working
partnerships. It's no longer enough to focus on promoting existing
export goods and services - they have to look at developing
exports. In 1999, ITC held the first Executive Forum to fill a gap
in research on practical, working strategies for successful export
development. Government-business teams from developing and
transition economies share experiences from their country and learn
from others.
The idea for the Executive Forum took shape after years of contact
between ITC staff and government and business leaders from across
the developing world and the new economies emerging from the former
Soviet Union.
"Back in 1999," says ITC Executive Director J. Denis Bélisle, "our
intention was to advance the idea that decision-makers in
developing and transition economies needed to broaden their
approach to export development if they were to achieve a sustained
improvement in national export performance. The purpose was to
promote the importance for every country of putting in place a
realistic national export strategy and the capacity to manage it.
And that remains our basic philosophy today."
Mr Bélisle, whose home country, Canada, has built up a successful
national brand as an international trader as well as in ice hockey,
argues that strategy-making is "a team sport". This, he says, "is
not a discipline to be tackled by a single institution. To be
relevant, a national export strategy must reflect the input of a
spectrum of public sector organizations. And it must involve the
direct and continuous participation of the private sector.
Participation is a precondition of ownership." Every country
attending the Executive Forum has to send representatives from
government and business in a national team.
Debate, not lectures
To get that message over, says ITC specialist Brian Barclay, the
key organizer of the Executive Forum from the first, it was vital
to bring representatives of private and public sectors in all
participating countries together in a relaxed but businesslike
atmosphere, well away from their daily pressures. They could learn
from each other how to make their countries more competitive in
global markets and what resources they would need to create and
maintain national programmes to do that.
"Our ideal format was to have open debate and discussion, not
lectures and speeches; not to teach but to spread awareness of all
the issues involved," explains Mr Barclay. "It is for our partners
to come and talk about what 'best practices' they have adopted and
how successful they have been, but leave it to others to decide
what is possible and practicable to adapt to their own national
conditions."
A break from the ordinary
"There is nothing quite like this on the international business
conference circuit," remarks Femi Boyede, Chief Executive of
Nigeria's Koinonia Ventures, an export services company, over
coffee at a Montreux hotel one warm Indian summer day at the end of
September 2004. "There is real interaction. We all learn from each
other."
"This gathering is absolutely unique, and we are in a good position
to know because we organize a lot of conferences ourselves," notes
Wang Jinzhen, Assistant Chairman and Spokesman of China's Council
for the Promotion of International Trade. "No other international
forum deals with the issues we discuss here in such depth and with
such a practical focus."
Their comments, echoed by participants from many other countries,
illustrate the achievements of the Executive Forum on National
Export Strategies five years after it was launched in 1999 - "a
modest project at the time," as Mr Barclay puts it.
Since 2000, the meeting has been held annually in Montreux, at the
eastern end of Switzerland's Lake Geneva. Montreux is now likely to
be its permanent home in late September every year under a
partnership between ITC and the Swiss State Secretariat for
Economic Affairs (
seco).
From export promotion to export development
Mr Boyede explains the problems in his own country that the
meetings have helped to address: "In the past, Nigerian companies
were everywhere at international trade fairs, waving the flag and
promoting our goods. They would return with their order books full,
announce what a success it all had been… and then find that they
didn't have the capacity to carry out the contracts they had
signed. That certainly didn't help our image as a reliable trading
partner."
Attitudes, says Mr Barclay, were similar in many other developing
countries: "This was a mindset that had to be changed."
In preparing for that first meeting, says Mr Bélisle, "our
fundamental premise was, and remains, that export strategy involves
more than just trying to sell what you already produce. It is more
than just protecting access into traditional markets. In our view,
national export strategy is about export development, not export
promotion. It should be designed to build long-term competitiveness
at the level of the enterprise, the product sector and the nation
as a whole."
Participants take over
What started as a consultation among a select few has grown into a
much larger venture. In Montreux in 2004, national teams from 43
countries attended. Participants come from Amman to Abidjan, from
Bangkok to Bucharest and from Lima to Lusaka. The nature of the
gathering has also changed. Whereas ITC set the programme in 1999,
the Executive Forum has now been taken over by its participants.
"It has built a network of its own alumni and they get together to
decide what it will discuss," says Mr Barclay. In 2004, that
network, and not ITC, set the agenda for the debate and carried out
most of the research on which the "best practice" propositions to
be presented were based. "ITC has become the facilitator rather
than the initiator, no longer a catalyst but a service
organization," he adds.
Every participating team provides a paper setting out its own
experience in building a national strategy, showing setbacks as
well as successes. At the 2004 Executive Forum, Cambodia's strategy
team offered its view that it was not necessary to create a large
sector of medium-sized firms to generate economic, and export,
growth. "Rather, a healthy, growing economy is characterized by a
healthy small business sector, with impediments to growth like
excessive regulations and procedures that are eradicated," its
paper notes.
The Bangladeshi team focused on some countries' need for a
predominant orientation towards established sectors in export
policies, pointing to the success of its own clothing industry in
penetrating global markets. However, it noted that this success had
also been built on the guaranteed quota access to major economies
provided by the Multi-Fibre Arrangement, which will be replaced
from January 2005 by a global tariff system. Only when that change
has taken place will it be possible to determine whether the
industry is truly competitive. "Evidence suggests that sectoral
orientation may be a good option in formulating an export strategy
if the comprehensive action plan takes into consideration the
situation in the external market," the team's paper says.
Other issues covered at the 2004 Executive Forum included: The 10
Essential Elements of a Successful National Export Strategy;
Sustaining the Public-Private Partnership; Competitiveness through
Export Clusters; Export Value Addition through Integration of the
Tourism, Entertainment and Productive Sectors; and The Gender
Dimension - Best Practice Scenarios.
Sparking new ideas
Jacqueline Emmanuel-Albertinie, a financial consultant from St
Lucia currently serving as coordinator of her country's National
Export Development Strategy Team, was enthusiastic about the
programme for the Executive Forum, which she attended for the first
time in 2004. "This really gives us an insight on where we should
be going," she says. "It wouldn't be easy for me to get my hands on
the kind of research and information that we pick up here. The
Executive Forum gives us the chance to compare notes with others
who are working in the same direction. And that helps us to learn
from other people's errors. That is very important for a small
country like ours, where mistakes can turn out to be very costly.
Not everything we have been hearing about could be applied on the
scale of St Lucia, but the discussion certainly helps clarify for
us what it is that we must do."
China's Wang Jinzhen found a presentation from the Thai team, about
its creation of export clusters linking villages around the
country, of special interest. "Maybe this is a technique that we
can apply because export growth in our country is focused in the
main cities and along the coastal areas. This may well help us in
our efforts to reduce poverty in rural areas."
Ricardo Estrada Estrada, Executive President of Ecuador's Export
Promotion Corporation, says: "We first came here as a young
institution, only two years old, and we were learning from scratch
what a trade promotion organization must do to be efficient. What
we have picked up from the Executive Forum has been invaluable in
our own development. Every year we learn new things that help us to
continually evaluate what we're doing. We try to keep up with
developments in our business, and attending this forum is the best
way of doing it. It gives me an opportunity to think on a strategic
level, which it is very difficult to find time for back home. I
think we also make a good contribution. We have many interesting
experiences to share, both positive and negative. And, above all,
where else do you have the opportunity to share experiences with so
many top-level executives from private and public sector bodies in
the trade area from around the world?"
Each Executive Forum is attended by one-third of alumni and
two-thirds of newcomers, with a view to maintaining a balance
between tradition and new ideas. All then join the Executive Forum
network.
Writer: Robert J. EvansOrganizations mentioned in this story:
Related ITC sites
Executive Forum
http://www.intracen.org/execforum