Babson Global Taps Shanker Singham to Lead Newly Established Competitiveness and Enterprise Development Project

Babson will work with developing countries to generate economic growth through entrepreneurship.

WELLESLEY, Mass., Sept. 26, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Babson Global, a wholly owned subsidiary of Babson College designed to increase the college's global reach, announced that it has established the Babson Global Competitiveness and Enterprise Development Project focused on working with developing countries to generate economic growth through entrepreneurship. The Project will be led by Managing Director Shanker Singham, founder of the International Roundtable on Trade and Competition Policy and author of a seminal text book on trade, competition and regulatory systems.

The Babson Global Competitiveness and Enterprise Development Project is based on the core principle that economies and societies do best, and lift the poor out of poverty at the highest rate, when they organize themselves around merit-based competition. The Project's central mission is to work with developing countries to put in place the necessary regulatory environment and infrastructure that will spur economic growth and set the pre-conditions required for entrepreneurship.

"There is simply no greater challenge faced by mankind than helping to lift people out of poverty and frame a world of abundance, and not of scarcity," said Shanker Singham, Managing Director of the CED Project. "By leveraging the forces of the competitive market system, as opposed to relying on aid, the Babson Global Competitiveness and Enterprise Development Project seeks to identify new ways of delivering economic growth to countries around the world."

"The Babson Global Competitiveness and Enterprise Development Project gives us another powerful tool to use entrepreneurial thought and action to address the economic and social problems facing the world and allow individuals and societies to thrive and prosper during these challenging economic times," said Shahid Ansari, CEO of Babson Global.

Building on the work of the Roundtable on Trade and Competition, founded in 1997 by Singham, the Project is designed to demonstrate and advocate for the benefits of liberalized trade, competitive markets and property rights protection.

The Project's four-pronged mission includes:

Mission 1: Development of enterprise cities

• Support the establishment of zones with autonomous regulatory systems, managed by public-private partnerships.
• Promote a pro-competitive business environment, based on liberalized trade, competitive markets and property rights protection.
• Provide real-world evidence of the power of the competitive market model to drive economic growth and poverty alleviation.

Mission 2: Develop the "how to" of eliminating government distortions and other road blocks to entrepreneurial activity

• Develop the optimal organizational model to eliminate government distortions and to liberate the forces of entrepreneurship.
• Utilize lessons learned from the Enterprise Cities to continually improve the model.
• Deliver content from the model to the Enterprise Cities.
• Work with governments, development agencies and the private sector to develop scholarship and cutting edge research around these concepts.

Mission 3: Advocacy for the principles that can be demonstrated in these enterprise cities

• Employ media vehicles—TV, print media and eventually a mainstream book—to tell the story of the economic and societal benefits that arise from the competitive market model.
• Address entrenched skepticism of the profit model with real-world examples of success from the Enterprise Cities.
• Focus the argument on the power of the competitive market model to alleviate poverty and promote community-wide economic growth.

Mission 4: Curriculum development and teaching

• Develop the pedagogy and curriculum for the next generation of entrepreneurs, private sector players and government officials.
• Focus teaching and scholarship on the wealth generation and poverty alleviation that stems from a liberalized trading system, competitive markets and property rights protection.
• Leverage the unique diversity of Babson's student body to serve as international advocates for the power of the competitive market model.

About Shanker Singham, Managing Director of the Project

In the course of Singham's work with the Roundtable on Trade and Competition, with law firms in which he has led global market access practices, and now at Babson, he has focused on finding answers to the question of how best an economy should order itself, and how best a system of governance should operate in order to maximize economic output and wealth creation. Singham's conclusions were developed as a result of assisting governments in the early privatizations during the Thatcher Administration in the UK, opening up Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (and assisting those governments in drafting privatization and competition laws) in the early 1990s, by repeating this work in Latin America after the apertura, and through China's WTO accession and the emergence of the BRIC countries and are contained in his many writings on the subject.

About Babson Global

Babson Global is a wholly owned subsidiary of Babson College designed to increase the college's global reach. The mission of Babson Global is "to put the power of entrepreneurship as the greatest force for social and economic value creation, in the hands of as many people in the world as we can." Babson Global delivers programs that extend Babson's unique pedagogy based on Entrepreneurial Thought and Action™ to new populations beyond the audience for our current undergraduate, graduate and executive education programs.

SOURCE Babson Global