From left: Sheikh Mohammed bin Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani, Dr Darwish El Amadi, and Sarah Abdullah at the press conference in Doha.
BY MOHAMMAD SHOEB
DOHA: The World Economic Forum (WEF) in partnership with the Qatari Businessmen Association (QBA) and SESRI - Social Economic Survey Research Institute in Qatar University — will conduct the Executive Opinion Survey 2013 in Qatar; QBA and Qatar University announced in a jointly held press conference at the QBA office recently.
The Opinion Survey is part of an annual exercise conducted by the Geneva-based WEF in 144 countries to prepare the Global Competitiveness Report (Index) 2013-14. The Competitiveness Report studies 12 competitive pillars in 144 economies to provide a comprehensive picture of the degree of market competitiveness in these countries.
The Survey, “The Voice of the Business Community” is a major component of The Global Competitiveness Report and provides the key ingredient that turns the report into a representative annual measure of a nation’s economic environment and its ability to achieve sustained growth.
Present at the conference were Sheikh Mohammed bin Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani, QBA member, Dr Darwish El Emadi, Director of SESRI and Sarah Abdullah, Deputy General Manager of QBA.
SESRI in coordination with QBA will gather valuable information on a broad range of variables for which hard data sources are scarce or nonexistent. High level business executives operating in Qatar will be surveyed to capture their opinion on the business environment in which they operate.
Some of the competitive pillars that are evaluated under the survey include efficiency of legal institutions, quality of infrastructure, health and education facilities, labour and financial market, market dominance and many other important factors determining business competitiveness.
Last year, in The Global Competitiveness Report 2012-13, Qatar ranked 11th (out of 144 countries) leading the entire Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, advancing three ranks from the previous year.
In the previous report, ‘the most problematic factors for doing business’ in Qatar included access to finance, inflation, restrictive labour regulations, inadequate supply of educated workforce and infrastructure, and government bureaucracy.
However, government stability, tax rates, crime and theft remained as the least problematic factors for the businesses, thus received least response.
Under the survey, executives from about 282 big and small companies in Qatar will be asked to complete this important and confidential exercise.
“In the survey, we target small and large companies in Qatar to know about attitude, environment and regulatory problems they face within their respective sectors. Then we will send the findings to the WEF in Geneva in May where they put it together with other information and findings that they collect from other sources for a unified Global Competitive Report, said Dr Darwish.
The Peninsula
