Competitive advantage: creating and sustaining superior performance

Recently the leading role of the agricultural sector to growth in Ethiopia has been challenged by the service and manufacturing sectors. This is partly due to the government’s policy that focuses on the development of the industrial sector, as stipulated in the Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP).

Why the 3rd Conference on Financing for Development is critical for the Post-2015 Development Agenda

Addis Ababa, the third largest diplomatic hub in the world, is preparing to host one of the most important conferences of the year: the 3rd International Conference on Financing for Development (also known as the Addis Conference), which will be held from July 13-16, 2015. It is going to be attended by high-level representatives of governments, international and non-governmental organizations and the private sector.

MILAN – When World War II ended 70 years ago, much of the world – including industrialized Europe, Japan, and other countries that had been occupied – was left geopolitically riven and burdened by heavy sovereign debt, with many major economies in ruins. One might have expected a long period of limited international cooperation, slow growth, high unemployment, and extreme privation, owing to countries’ limited capacity to finance their huge investment needs.

Ending extreme poverty and building shared prosperity across the developing world are noble goals; but they are also expensive, requiring financing on a scale far greater than what governments in developing countries, their donors, and local financial institutions are able to provide.

Until relatively recently, countries’ so-called middle-income transitions were largely ignored – in part because what was supposed to be a transition often became a trap. A few economies in Asia – particularly Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – sailed through to high-income status with relatively high growth rates. But the vast majority of economies slowed down or stopped growing altogether in per capita terms after entering the middle-income range.
Today, investors, policymakers, and businesses have several reasons to devote much more attention to these transitions. For starters, with a GDP that is as large as the combined total of the other BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa) plus Indonesia and Mexico, China has raised the stakes considerably. Sustained Chinese growth, or its absence, will have a significant effect on all other developing countries – and on the advanced economies as well.

Family-owned firms are the backbone of the world’s economies, but only a third survive to the second generation. In much of the world, family and firms are perhaps the two most important institutions, and these are often intertwined. The creation, growth and longevity of family businesses are critical to the success of the global economy. Indeed the majority of businesses in the world are family controlled – and these range from unsung, modestly-sized firms to commercial giants such as Ford, Samsung and Hyundai.

The WTO Multilateral Trade Negotiations in Bali almost failed. By negotiating for one day beyond the scheduled conference time, 159 exhausted nations finally concluded an agreement.
What’s at stake are the rules which govern trade among member nations in goods, services and intellectual property. They are the foundation of the present world economic order. Indeed, these negotiations are the most important to be held in any area of multilateral negotiations among the nations of the world for at least 30 years.

Living aside the long history of the use of money in Ethiopia that can be traced back more than 2000 years. It is following the demise of the Dergue, that the post-1991 economic policy witnessed a marked departure from the previous Socialist system. This new change in policy brought about a significant change in the functioning of the financial sector. Not only was the financial sector going to serve the private sector, which had hitherto been demonized, but new private financial institutions, also emerged. At the same time the role of the Ethiopia’s central bank, the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE), was also reformulated.

WASHINGTON, DC – Financial markets and the news media have one thing in common: they tend to oscillate rapidly between hype and gloom. Nowhere is this more apparent than in analyses of emerging economies’ prospects. In the last few months, enthusiasm about these countries’ post-2008 economic resilience and growth potential has given way to bleak forecasts, with economists like Ricardo Hausmann declaring that “the emerging-market party” is coming to an end.

Industrial System Management is a way of using industrial engineering principles to solve industrial inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and the lack of operation safety. An example would be using facility design to improve facility layout in order to maximize the efficiency of the production process; or using lean manufacturing to eliminate waste and ensure effectiveness in production areas, and using Six Sigma to statistically control and ensure the quality of products.