ARAB COMPETITIVENESS THROUGH A RESPONSIBILITY LENS
✸ Policy drivers: analysing the strength of public policies and ‘soft power’ that encourage responsible business practices, from signing and implementing international conventions through to setting the framework for private sector employment of women; ✸ Business action: measuring the application of good corporate governance procedures, and social and environmental management systems; and ✸ Social Enablers: the role of civil society in encouraging and challenging businesses and government to build effective collaborations to reshape markets.
Table 1.2: Limitations of measuring responsible competitiveness Like all data-rich exercises, capturing the right pieces of information is difficult. Measuring responsible competitiveness is no different. This report presents two indices, using the best quality data available for the region. However, even these indicators have real limitations and caveats globally and particularly in the Arab World. These include: ✸ Poor country coverage. Few international data gatherers are capturing data across the whole region in a systematic way. ✸ Datasets have significant time lags and the most recent data available for indicators like carbon intensity may be three or four years out of date when they are released. ✸ Sporadic information on country performance, makes it difficult to assemble a full set of data and comprehensively assess progress towards responsible competitiveness for some countries. ✸ Quality of data collected. Many indicators are based on opinion surveys of business executives, and while their views may be more relevant than national citizens in some areas, they might not provide adequate insight across the full range of issues. Furthermore, this type of indicator can be further skewed if business leaders are particularly pleased with the current performance or if they have been prepared to respond to questions in a certain way.
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