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March 4, 2008
Irish competitiveness
I've recently come across the Irish National Competitiveness Council's latest report: Ireland's Competitiveness Challenge 2007. This series of annual reports looks at both the current situation and the recommended policy responses. The 2007 report takes a hard look at the Celtic Miracle:
Ireland has made remarkable economic progress over the past 15 years and current growth rates remain strong. However, the NCC is concerned that non-sustainable domestic factors, rather than international competitiveness, have driven our economic growth in recent years. Maintaining and improving our living standards will depend on improving our competitiveness performance through reinstating exports as a key driver of growth. This rebalancing of growth is dependent on remaining competitive.
Managing costs, improving productivity and building innovative enterprises are the basic policy thrusts recommended by the report. There are a lot more detailed recommendations in the report – most of which will be familiar to anyone who has followed this area of public policy. One thing did stand out to me however – the recommendation about “learning enterprises”:
Research from the National Centre for Partnership and Performance (NCPP) highlights that in response to greater competitive pressures, enterprises are increasingly introducing new products and services and are improving goods or services already provided. Firms are also focusing on training and development and encouraging greater flexibility in their workforce. However, NCPP research indicates that further progress is required in developing a culture of continuous learning which incorporates employee participation and training and development practices. The NCPP’s workplace innovation fund needs to be strongly promoted as well as a partnership approach at enterprise level to develop appropriate action plans.
This is an idea that the US should pay closer attention to. There has been a great amount of research in the US about these “high-performance work organizations” (including some I have done – see Time to Get Serious About Workplace Change). However, little attention has been given to actual public policy to foster such activities. We need to change that.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at March 4, 2008 12:07 PM
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