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World Bank report "Competitiveness Partnerships"

Benjamin Herzberg and Andrew Wright recently published a report for the World Bank on public-private dialogue. It is titled "Competitiveness Partnerships: Building and Maintaining Public-Private Dialogue to Improve the Investment Climate - A Resource Drawn from the Review of 40 Countries' Experiences".

This paper is a follow-up of a case study published in 2004 by Herzberg on the Bulldozer Initiative in Bosnia and Herzegovina. (See "Policy, Research working paper WPS 3390").

The Bulldozer Initiative sought to overcome the problem of the "constituency gap", which arises when donors and governments design reforms without sufficient input from the core constituency of stakeholders who will ultimately be affected by them. The initiative tried to bridge this gap in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Reforms had been made which were better conceived and more effectively implemented because they arose from increased mutual understanding between government and the business community.

In this paper, the authors investigate the experience of other countries with competitiveness partnerships and seek to identify common and replicable strategies and success factors. The intention is to come up with a variety of ideas and opinions on which practitioners can draw when considering their own particular circumstances.

You can download the report at the World Bank website