News Releases

Making 21st Century business work for growth

For Release Upon Receipt - June 26, 2013

St. Augustine


ST. AUGUSTINE, Trinidad and Tobago – Professor Adam Szirmai, Professional Fellow at the United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT) traces modern industrial policy and looks at new challenges and new opportunities and asks the question, “Is the manufacturing sector still the main engine of growth?” in a public lecture entitled Making 21st Century business work for growth: Industrial Policy and Global Competitiveness.

Attendees will be guided through various alternative industrialisation strategies - the balanced growth path, unbalanced growth, support for small scale and informal enterprises and the most important alternative, export oriented industrialisation. Szirmai will discuss variants of this last approach including labour intensive exports, technological upgrading and learning, foreign investment-led exports and resource based industrialisation. He will then focus on 21st century challenges such as the emergence of global value chains, danger of the middle income trap, premature de-industrialisation, jobless growth, global warning and sustainable models of industrialisation, competition from the global Chinese workforce and restrictions of policy space. Finally, he will explore the emergence of global value chains and the new opportunities it offers for smaller economies, new types of industrial policy for learning economies, the key role of entrepreneurial innovation, new relationships between public policy and private enterprise and the need for permanent experimentation.

The lecture takes place today at the Noor Hassanali Auditorium, Faculty of Law, the University of the West Indies (UWI) St. Augustine from 5:30pm.

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About THE UWI

Over the last six decades, The University of the West Indies (UWI) has evolved from a fledgling college in Jamaica with 33 students to a full-fledged University with over 40,000 students. Today, UWI is the largest and most longstanding higher education provider in the English-speaking Caribbean, with main campuses in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, and Centres in Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St Christopher (St Kitts) & Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent & the Grenadines. UWI recently launched its Open Campus, a virtual campus with 45 physical site locations across the region, serving 16 countries in the English-speaking Caribbean. UWI is an international university with faculty and students from over 40 countries and collaborative links with over 60 universities around the world. Through its seven Faculties, UWI offers undergraduate and postgraduate degree options in Engineering, Humanities & Education, Law, Medical Sciences, Science & Technology, Food & Agriculture, and Social Sciences.

 (Please note that the proper name of the university is The University of the West Indies, inclusive of the “The”, hence The UWI.)

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