Botswana�s poor work ethic repute worsens
Brian Benza | Tuesday October 6, 2015 10:54
According to the recently released 2015-16 Global Competitiveness Report (GCR), poor work ethic is the most problematic factor for doing business in Botswana with the severity of the problem increasing by 0.5% in relation to the previous year. In this year’s report, like in the previous six reports, poor work ethic again topped the list of problematic areas for doing business with a score of 19 out of 30. This was a deterioration from 18.5 scored in the previous report.
The report reflects results of a survey carried out by the Botswana National Productivity Centre (BNPC) on behalf of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in which respondents were asked to select the most problematic factors for doing business in their country; ranging from corruption, crime and theft, government instability/coups and tax regulations.
The report comes at a time when the BNPC, as the national partner of the WEF, is set to host a one-day conference under the theme: “Productivity and Competitiveness’’ on the 20th October 2015. At the conference, stakeholders will review progress in Botswana’s competitiveness thus far and discuss strategies for progressing the country’s productivity and competitiveness agenda.
During the conference, the BNPC will also launch the 2015 Productivity Statistics Report which reflects national productivity trends. The BNPC has previously said that studies have revealed that the most problematic issues concerning work ethic were mainly the attitude and reliability of the workforce.
In this year’s report, the second most problematic factors identified by the GCR was inefficiency related to government bureaucracy with a score of 12.7 out of 30 followed by restrictive labour regulations with score of 11.9. Policy and government instability still remain the least problematic factors for doing business in the country.
Despite the problematic factors, which continue to regress Botswana’s competitive edge, Botswana still managed to move three positions up the overall rankings.
In this year’s report, Botswana is ranked 71st out of 140 countries from positions 74 in the previous report.
Despite the improvement in ranking, the quality score however remained stagnant at 4.2.
Regionally, Botswana remains in 4th place, behind Mauritius, South Africa and Rwanda, which attained positions 46, 49 and 58 respectively. The macroeconomic environment, ranked at 9th position globally, still remains Botswana’s main competitiveness strength, mainly attributable to the country’s balanced fiscal budget, higher gross national savings and lower levels of inflation.
Notwithstanding these accomplishments, the GCR shows that Botswana still struggles with other pillars such as business sophistication (111th), market size (105th), innovation (102nd) higher education and training (100th) and goods market efficiency (95th).
“This is mainly triggered by the fact that Botswana is in transition stage of development from being a factor driven economy to an efficiency driven one,” the BNPC says. “As a result, Botswana performs better on the factor driven pillars relative to efficiency and innovation driven pillars of competitiveness.”
The Global Competitiveness Report’s competitiveness ranking is based on the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), which was introduced by the WEF in 2004. Defining competitiveness as the set of institutions, policies and factors that determine the level of productivity of a country, GCI scores are calculated by drawing together country-level data covering 12 categories – the pillars of competitiveness – that collectively make up a comprehensive picture of a country’s competitiveness.
The health and primary education remain the least performing pillars (119th). HIV/AIDS remains the biggest obstacle facing Botswana in efforts to improve her overall competitiveness.
The study also found out that Botswana was still in transition from stage one, which is factor-driven, to stage two, which is efficiency-driven. Three key stages of development were identified as: factor-driven, efficiency-driven and innovation-driven. Mauritius remains the region’s most competitive economy (46th), closely followed by South Africa (49th) and Rwanda (58th). Côte d’Ivoire (91st) and Ethiopia (109th) excel as this year’s largest improvers in the region overall.
The first place in the GCI rankings, for the seventh consecutive year, goes to Switzerland.