By RANOBA BAOA
Fiji National University’s three-day Pacific Conference on Finance and Investment which ended yesterday, finished off on a great note.
These were the comments made by the dean of FNU’s College of Business, Hospitality & Tourism Studies, Dr Mahendra Reddy.
Dr Reddy said the idea of hosting the Pacific Conference on Finance and Investment was to bridge the gap between policy makers and researchers.
“It was a highly successful conference, fulfilling the primary objective of the conference was that universities are supposed to do research and creating knowledge,” he said.
“So that’s what we did. In the conference, we were able to facilitate presenters, researchers, professors who did solid research and presented their papers here.”
Over 60 papers were presented which will be circulated to all relevant government and private sectors, especially the key policy makers within the economy.
Fine-tuning policies
“The whole conference was to help policy makers as well as the people in the private sector to fine-tune their policies,” Dr Reddy said.
“We will be sending all the papers to Government if they haven’t got it and it’s up to them to see how they will use this data.
“The idea was to bridge the gap between policy and research.
“We do research and the policymakers are there in the private and government sector. These conferences help us to massage this information to make it palatable for them.”
Papers included a range of economic topics that would help drive growth not only in Fiji but for the rest of the Pacific.
These included mining, local and global investment, competition economics, vulnerability and economic resilience and more.
Dr Reddy said the university is looking to organise the event again come 2015.