Regional Executive Forum 2002
Session 1 - Moving from Comparative to Competitive Advantage – What are the Issues?

The Issue: National export strategy-makers in Africa need to focus on building competitive advantage. Yet few African countries have adopted this forward-looking approach. Strategy-makers continue to base export strategy on inherited comparative advantage. 

The Proposition: Strategy must be dynamic, moving emphasis from traditional export sectors to those with potential factor-driven competitive advantage, then to investment-related competitive advantage and eventually to innovation-driven competitive advantage.  

There are three reasons why African countries have not focussed strategy on developing competitive advantage.  Specifically: 

• Strategy-makers have not invested sufficiently in undertaking a critical assessment of where they currently stand in terms of competitiveness, despite the fact that tools and databases are available to support such analyses.
• Strategy-makers fail to adopt effective approaches to scenario-building and priority setting on where to go.
• As the above suggest, the process of strategy development remains weak in most African countries. It does not have top-level political support; it is not based on a solid public-private sector partnership; nor does it simultaneously address bottlenecks at the macro, meso and micro levels.

The first step in ensuring long term export competitiveness is for national strategy-makers to address these fundamental weaknesses and to adopt a more concerted, analytical and dynamic approach to strategy design and management. 

Focus of the Debate: Is the competitive advantage approach to strategy development relevant to African countries and, if so, what are the implications for strategy-makers and the current strategy-making process?  How can the principal bottlenecks to effective strategy design and management be overcome?