‘Nam’s low competitiveness becoming a trend’

THE National Planning Commission (NPC) on Friday said Namibia’s declining economic competitiveness is not only worrying, but distressing.

The loss of economic competitiveness is ‘distressing because it has now become a trend’, NPC Director General Tom Alweendo said in a statement.Namibia is ‘running out of time’ to get its house in order and reach the goals set out under Vision 2030, he said.Alweendo reacted on Namibia’s poor performance on the latest Global Competitive Index (GCI), released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Thursday.It showed that Namibia has plummeted 18 positions on the GCI since 2010. The 2012-13 ladder placed Namibia 92nd overall out of 144 countries worldwide, down from 83rd in 2011-12 and 74th in 2010-11.Labour market conditions proved to be major constraint of Namibia’s ranking on the latest index. The country took a massive hit of 17 positions in the category for labour market efficiency in the 2012-13 index. Last year, Namibia was ranked 57th in this category; this year it fell to 74th.Alweendo, who as NPC chief is spearheading Namibia’s Fourth National Development Plan (NDP4), called on all Namibians to ensure that the country’s competitiveness looks better in the next WEF report.According to NDP4, Namibia has to be the most competitive economy in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) by 2017.According to the new GCI, Namibia is the fourth most competitive economy in SADC.South Africa is the most competitive, followed by Mauritius and Botswana.Alweendo on Friday said ‘one of the binding constraints to sustainable high economic growth and employment creation identified under NDP4 is that of economic competitiveness. ‘One of the NDP4 desired outcomes is therefore to become the most competitive economy in the SADC region by 2017 by addressing our institutional environment,’ he said.To do this, Namibia will have to look at improving the general business environment, the cost of doing business, access to finance, innovation, skills availability, labour market efficiency, public service delivery and the cooperation between the public and private sector.’Without successfully addressing these issues our economic competitiveness will continue to deteriorate and our vision of being an industrialised nation [under Vision 2030] will be under threat to become a nightmare,’ Alweendo said. However, ‘the good thing’ is that Namibia has a plan in place how to realise Vision 2030, he said.’All what is required of us is to ensure that we implement the plan [NDP4] on an urgent basis,’ Alweendo said.’The NPC is hard at work to ensure that all the sectors are aware of what is required of them in order to fully implement NDP4,’ he said.