Tag Archives: systemic competitiveness

New Podcast Episode: On competitiveness

We have just launched a new episode on the Systemic Insight Podcast. In this episode, I discuss with Shawn the concept of competitiveness. The chat was inspired by some reading I had been doing that condemned competition to be part of the driving force that makes our society so extractive and unequal.

In particular, I am using two quotes from Daniel Wahl’s book ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’ to exemplify the argument. To contrast this viewpoint, Shawn and I explore the positive aspects of competition and why competitiveness and in particular systemic competitiveness in the way it is used by Mesopartner and others still are and will remain important concepts in economic development – and why they can indeed also be forces that drive a positive transformation of society towards a more sustainable future. We also asked Christian Schoen to share his opinion on competitiveness in development. 

Find the episode on Libsyn or Apple Podcasts.

Refresher: why institutions matter for economic development

Prompted by some work for a client I dived back into the literature on institutions this week. It was a fascinating journey and I have discovered some other the things I have known before and confirmed many of my suspicions with the project at hand. Indeed, the reading confirmed my view that most market systems development projects pay too little attention to the institutions in a country, given their massive importance in shaping economic development. There is too much focus on finding solutions to fixing problems in the short term.

What I found fascinating while reading is that the insights from the theories on institutions and on complex systems actually overlap really neatly, with maybe slightly different ways of approaching change but in a coherent and complementary way.

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Presentation: Refreshing development

Marcus at the RSAI had the honour and pleasure to be a speaker on a panel last week at the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) in London. The event was titled “Refreshing Development: Making the Case for New Economic Thought in Global Development Policy”. It was part of a whole series of events 10 years after the economic crash in 2007 and supported by the Alumni network of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

My presentation was about transformational economic change and in it I tried to convey the basic ideas on how change happens in the economy, wrapped in the example of the “Growing Rubber Opportunities” (GRO) Project I have been supporting over the last four years in Myanmar. Continue reading