Business and prosperity
p. 33 · Read in the full issue
GOOD news for island business is a newly established partnership be tween the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and the Trade and Invest ment Promotion Service (TIPS) of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The partnership means more and more effective marketing and investment opportunities for the islands, but it heartens me personally for another reason. It s a very encour aging and sensible rationalisation of costs and efficiency, one of those opportunities that anybody running a private business will always look out for, but which the public sector, and particularly the world’s international agencies, are inclined to ignore. As
UNIDO and TIPS have many of the same objectives, it makes sense for them to avoid duplication by working together in this region. Let’s hope other international
agencies follow.
If you’ve not heard of the Trade and Investment Promotion Service you can be forgiven. It’s not a new service but it’s a new name for the past 20 years it has been known as the Market Advisory Service (MAS). The change of name happens to coincide with the new UNIDO arrangements, and certainly it better reflects its
objectives.
MAS’s International Trade Development Centres in Sydney and Melbourne have also taken the TIPS name.
The headquarters, under director Colin Robbie, remains in Canberra with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, but it is now in the Economic and Trade Development Division of the Trade Competitiveness Branch. Sydney director is Kevin Liddy, and in Melbourne it’s Norman Wall.
UNIDO is based in Vienna. One of its aims is to facilitate trade and investment in developing countries. It encourages foreign know-how or capital, or both, where it’s needed, through capital investments, joint ventures, licensing and other forms of transfer. It casts its net world wide, and will promote the transfer of capital and expertise from anywhere to anywhere else if it will help the interest of industrial development. It puts a lot of work and expertise into identifying and evaluating suitable projects and then getting them into the kind of shape needed before a joint venture or whatever can go ahead.
TIPS has similar objectives, if not a similar budget, but most of its activities are in the Asia-Pacific region, although it is empowered to go further afield and sometimes does. (Its activity sheet for the rest of this year, for instance, includes support for trade missions from
Zimbabwe, Mauritius, Poland and Peru as well as Tonga, Indonesia and Pakistan.) Under Australia’s Development Assist ance Program, TIPS helps de
veloping countries expand their
trade with Australia.
This is a genuine aid and development role TIPS wasn’t established to increase Australia’s export figures. At the South Pa cific Trade Commission we’ve
benefited by working closely with
the service on the SPARTECA program and in the staging of island trade displays and invest ment seminar.
Under the new agreement with UNIDO, which is in force for an
initial three-year period, TIPS is now the implementing agency for UNIDO in this part of the world being one of a number of world-wide UNIDO investment offices.
Colin Robbie tells me the service can now substantially increase opportunities for industrial co-operation projects in the Asia-Pacific region by processing and disseminating the wide range or prospects that have already been assessed by UNIDO experts.
“It means we have better tools to work with - a bigger number of potential investments in which the solid ground work has already been done,” Colin said. “Others will follow. It will help make us more effective.”
TIPS will “marry” the investment needs to those businesses interested in them. The service has already greatly enlarged its computerised database on such businesses with a recent questionaire it sent out to Australian companies, and which was returned in impressive numbers. It asked them whether, and how, they would be prepared to participate - by direct investment, joint investment, managerial help, licence
transfer, purchasing products, by offering consultancies,
provision of machinery, etc.
This improved database will also be an additional tool for us at the Trade Commission to help us answer trade inquiries and quickly identify investors.
All this comes at a time of fast-growing support for private sector involvement in the Pacific’s development.
There is increasing consensus that the engine of economic development in the region will not be driven by governments but by private entrepreneurs. That business is the way to prosperity.
And isn’t that the message many of us have been preaching for years?