Promoting Competitiveness in Practice - Economic Growth - usaid

2. Desk Review of Non-USAID Competitiveness Initiatives
The team also carried out a review of some of the competitiveness initiatives conducted
outside of USAID. Given the vast number of competitiveness initiatives in the non-USAID
world, this review could not be as comprehensive or as deep as the USAID review;
moreover, in most cases, the team was not able to meet one-on-one with the practitioners for
these initiatives. Nonetheless, the team was able to garner the range of experience in
developing countries and in industrialized countries, as well as better understand the
experience of the multi-lateral and regional development agencies including the World Bank,
the Inter-American Development Bank, UNIDO, and the OECD.
This desk review has recently been supplemented by two other important synthesis reports:
The Cluster Initiative Greenbook. This report was presented at The Competitiveness
Institute’s Sixth Global Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden in September 2003. Like the
USAID assessment, its purpose is help fill some of the critical gaps in understanding clusterbased
competitiveness initiatives and their outcomes. Specifically, its purpose is to describe
how cluster initiatives operate and explore possible success – and failure -- factors. The
report is based on an on-line survey of cluster initiatives, primarily in Europe, North
America, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. While the team received this report after the
completion of much of its analytical work, we have attempted to incorporate the most
relevant findings for USAID.
Report on Competitiveness Promotion in Colombia and El Salvador, Inter-American
Development Bank, July 2003 (unpublished manuscript). Like USAID, the IDB has been
working toward understanding the process and the results of promoting competitiveness.
Toward that end, it recently completed an in-depth review of competitiveness initiatives in
Colombia and El Salvador. During its preparation, The Mitchell Group team coordinated
with the IDB consultant team and shared approaches, findings and conclusions. We have
incorporated some of the report’s findings into this assessment.
3. Field Assessments
In addition to these desk reviews, the team carried out in-depth field assessments of two
competitiveness initiatives: the first one focused on The Competitiveness Initiative in
Mongolia, a USAID initiative. The second field assessment focused on Transformando
Campeche; this was not a USAID initiative, but rather, an initiative launched by the local
business community to revitalize the state of Campeche in southeastern Mexico. The
purpose of these field assessments was not to evaluate the performance of their respective
contractor teams. Rather, they focused on learning about what worked in order to inform and
improve future competitiveness efforts globally. The following types of questions were
central to the field methodology:
• What approaches have worked well – and what approaches have not worked?
• What has changed as a result of the competitiveness initiative – at the firm level, at
the cluster level, in the business environment, and in the policy arena? What types of
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