Britain slips in worldwide competitiveness rankings
Emerging markets represent the greatest cause for concern, with numerous larger markets seeing reverses this year, having failed to enact crucial institutional and market reforms during better times (India being the notable exception). Failure to boost competitiveness, in particular, was found to be compromising resilience to recession and other shocks. The top-ranking countries all fared well in this regard. Its competitiveness is founded on excellent infrastructure, a “healthy workforce” and a strong ecosystem for innovation thanks to sophisticated businesses, early adoption of new technologies and high-quality research institutions. Qatar (14th) leads the region, ahead of the United Arab Emirates (17th), although it remains more at risk than its neighbour to continued low energy prices, as its economy is less diversified. “The government remains committed in institutionalising measures that allow for private sector to flourish in a competitive environment.”. It also considered other facets such as business sophistication and innovation. Germany improves by one place to the fourth, while the Netherlands returns to the fifth place it held three years ago.
WEF said Malaysia performed most strongly in goods market efficiency and financial market development. Among the country’s remaining weak spots are overly restrictive labour regulations and tax rate on profits that, while it has decreased in recent years, remains high by worldwide standards.
Sub-Saharan Africa continues to grow close to 5%, but competitiveness and productivity remain low. Meanwhile, China was at 28 spot. Côte d’Ivoire (91st) and Ethiopia (109th) excel as this year’s largest improvers in the region overall.
SA’s global competitiveness ranking has finally improved after four years of deterioration, a key index released earlier on Tuesday showed.
Among contributing factors to the significant improvements, with more than ten places, are mobile broadband subscriptions (ranked 48th, up 45 places), net primary education enrollment (41st, up 19 places) and government budget balance (85th, up 17 places). But, despite this massive jump, which follows five years of a decline on the list, India still ranks seven notches lower than it did in 2007.
WEF said the quality of India’s institutions has improved (up 10 ranks to 60), although business leaders still consider corruption to be the biggest obstacle to doing business in the country.
“Competitiveness is a relative game, it’s not so much where you are today but where you are compared with others who are also moving forward”, said OCBC economist Selena Ling.
The “B” in Brics, Brazil continued its downward trend, dropping to 75, amid low prospects of growth and deteriorating terms of trade. Among the objectives of this Committee are to ensure the country’s growth momentum amid the volatile economic conditions globally as well as to ensure the prosperity and quality of life of all Malaysians are intact regardless of all situations. Its scores also improved in five of the 12 pillars, fell in another five and was flat in two.
Despite the improvement, however, the conduciveness of the country’s business environment continued to be hampered by “problematic factors”.