Top leaders call for efforts for next wave productivity growth
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The world's top business leaders Thursday called for the G20 countries to work with them to unleash the next wave of productivity growth to reduce poverty and improve people's life.
The business sector is the primary driver of productivity gains, and with collaboration with governments and between governments globally, potential of the global economy can be unleashed, said the corporate leaders attending the G20 Business Summit on Thursday.
The next decade has the potential to lift more people from the pit of poverty than all of the past decades combined, and in short, the financial well-being of billions of people can be enhanced, said the participants, who are also members of a working group on companies' social responsibility for the summit.
To achieve this goal, a joint commission should be set up between G20, or other relevant organizations like WTO, and business community to promote productivity through technology- enabled innovation, the working group said in a report.
The working group also advised the G20 countries to share their effective and innovative education and training programs with other countries, as a better-educated workforce is more productive.
For all G20 countries, the public sector is a large and growing sector of the economy while it is also the least productive one at the same time. Therefore another step is to work with business community to drive public sector's productivity.
"To unleash productivity does not mean governments should drive industrial policy, a rarely successful strategy," said the report. "Rather the public and private sectors should work together to drive the next frontier of productivity-led growth."
The Seoul G20 Business Summit, held on Nov. 10-11 in Seoul, brought together G20 heads of state and approximately 120 top business leaders from G20 countries and some non-G20 countries to jointly address "the Role of Business for Sustainable and Balanced Growth."
They engaged in 12 working groups dealing with issues of trade and investment, finance, energy efficiency, employment, healthcare and others.
