Globalisation ‘requires response from public sector’

3 Jul 14
Public servants must look beyond national borders and election cycles to meet the challenges of globalisation, the CIPFA conference heard from EY’s Uschi Schreiber.

By Mark Smulian | 3 July 2014

Public servants must look beyond national borders and election cycles to meet the challenges of globalisation, the CIPFA conference heard from EY’s Uschi Schreiber.

Schreiber, the firm’s global government and public sector leader, said six challenges faced governments around the world, all of which would require responses different from those on which they had long depended.

The first was the emergence of global interdependence, which meant ‘you cannot do anything significant at a national scale’, she said.

‘We are more connected to each other than ever before and solutions to problems will be interdependent.’

The second challenge was the shift in economic power from west to east with the growth of a large middle class consumer market in particular in Asian countries.

Schreiber said Indonesia, China, India, Turkey, Russia, Mexico and Brazil would between them soon exceed the economic size of the G7 countries.

Interconnectedness was the third theme, as e-mail, SMS and social media put billions of people around the world in instant touch with each other allowing access to more information than at any time in history.

By 2002 some 50bn electronic devices would ‘talk’ to each other without human intervention leading to a need to reassess the meaning of ‘intelligence’, she suggested.

The fourth challenge would be population growth, mainly in Africa, and also an increasingly ageing population in western nations and Japan.

‘We will also see growth in urbanisation with 10 cities in Asia by 2025 having populations of more than 25m.’

Climate change formed her fifth challenge as even the expected three degrees increase in world temperatures posed a danger of food shortages as agricultural land was flooded or turned to desert.

Biological, biotechnical an genetic technologies offered potential power to shape the course of evolution as the sixth challenge, Schreiber said, forming an industry potentially worth $1tn but requiring government regulation and rethinking of ethical issues.

For public servants these changes would require them to be ‘strong leaders who think quickly to react to demand from governments and the citizens, who have their eyes on the long-term and who are aware of solutions from around the world’, she said.

Schreiber also pressed the case for diversity, saying that increasing involvement by young people and women in decision-making would give better results by drawing on wider ranges of experience.

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