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| Friday, 5 March 2004 |
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Local entrepreneurs can save a nation from poverty - UN Report UNITED NATIONS - Lifting developing countries out of poverty depends largely on "unleashing the capacity of local entrepreneurs," according to a UN report issued yesterday. The study, Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for the Poor, says governments in both the developing and developed world should "focus on developing businesses that create domestic employment and wealth." The report was released by the Commission on the Private Sector and Development, which was set up last year by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, a Co-Chairman of the Commission, said, "The message (of the report) is precise and should be compelling: poverty will remain intractable in countries lacking a vigorous domestic private sector; therefore, the impediments to its development must be removed." Addressing a news conference with Annan and Zedillo, Prime Minister Paul Martin of Canada, the Commissioner's other Co-Chairman said, "For too long, development specialists have overlooked or downplayed the role of entrepreneurship in creating economic growth, providing employment, and in increasing productivity. Governments seeking to lift their people from chronic conditions of poverty must focus on the conditions that will allow local entrepreneurs to flourish." Annan said, "In the work for development, the UN has only sporadically tapped the power that can be drawn from engaging the private sector." He said, "Of particular interest are examples of new and effective approaches being developed and implemented by the private sector itself - by companies, civil society organisations, and labour unions." The report outlines steps governments in developing countries can take, including making "a strong and unambiguous policy commitment to sustainable private sector development," encouraging businesses to shift from the informal to formal sector by making the formal sector more appealing through fair taxation and elimination of cronyism and "improving the rules and processes for registering the titling of land, critical preconditions for financial access based on these assets." Developed countries and multilateral financial institutions need to help by "increasing the flow of development aid and reforming the global trading system to provide fair economic opportunities to producers from developing countries which are essential for promoting rapid growth in domestic private investment," the report says. Rather than seeing multinational corporate interests as at odds with domestic private sectors, the commissioners saw them as partners in promoting domestic entrepreneurs. "There is not a conflict between the domestic private sector and the multinational sector," said Zedillo, "I think there are enormous synergies that unfortunately are not taken advantage of because it is very hard for local entrepreneurs to develop." "When we talk about multinationals we are talking about them in the context of helping the development of the local private sector," said Martin. The report recommends multinationals assist local businesses by training local business people and by buying goods and services from local businesses. All this is happening, said Zedillo. "We just need more of it," he said. |
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