productivity and competitiveness is driven by many things in fact this is the real challenge of competitiveness if competitiveness was just setting one policy it might be hard but it would be relatively easy the problem is the competitiveness is setting hundreds of policies thousands of policies affecting every aspect of the fabric of an economy in a society as we see on this slide when we think about competitiveness and wheat when we try to explain competitiveness across countries a whole series of fundamental drivers are involved starting with macroeconomic policy which we all know but also social infrastructure
like education systems and health systems are fundamental the quality of political institutions and the way government works is fundamental and then of course the micro economic factors like the business environment the efficiency with which business can be done the efficiency with which goods and services can be moved around communication takes place information flows the sophistication of companies themselves last night's Saudi fast growth 100 ceremony was really about trying to capture and stimulate the improvement in the corporate sector and in particular in entrepreneurship so to build a competitive economy we have to build competitive companies that
are world class that operate with the best ideas and the best strategies and the best methods and the best technology and we also know that it to build a competitive economy we have to build clusters we have to build areas where we have a critical mass where we have enough companies and enough knowledge and enough expertise that we can truly be productive as Saudi Arabia has done in petrochemicals as its trying to do in other fields as well this is a daunting agenda the agenda of competitiveness the reason that so many countries can't make progress
is that it's so complicated there's so many things that have to improve and you can be overwhelmed because one can't do everything at once it takes time it takes commitment it takes consistency to truly drive competitiveness because you have to touch so many areas that affect that are that are part of the job of every single Ministry of government to really truly transform competiveness we find that productivity which is fundamentally what competitiveness is all about can be very strongly affected by coordinating policies with the neighbors in a variety of ways and we'll talk about some
of those in just a moment if you can integrate your region that makes investment more attractive in every country because by coming into one country you can serve the region not just the local market and finally if you can talk as a region and act as a region you can often have much more weight and influence in international relations including with the international financial institutions the international development institutions and others with which the country deals yes Saudi Arabia is a substantial country but if it if Saudi Arabia goes with the whole region it is even
more influential that's what we found in other parts of the world as we've seen the history of development and competitiveness development agendas now when we think about regional integration the traditional kind of thinking about regional integration is it tends to be relatively narrow the the focus traditionally has been primarily on trade and market opening opening the the region to be a free trade zone a customs union a common market and and and supportive steps that will encourage that opening of trade at an investment but I believe very strongly that that's a too limited view that
actually regional integration is much more important than that it's not just about trade it's not just about investment it's about competitiveness it's about using a collaboration to impact the many many many areas that affect competitors all the way from logistics to financial markets to energy use and more
