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US tops global competitiveness rating, despite ‘worrying’ trends: WEF
GENEVA, Oct 17, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – The United States has the world’s most
competitive and innovative economy, a World Economic Forum ranking showed
Wednesday, after a methodology shift helped unseat Switzerland after nearly a
decade on top.
The organisation that hosts the annual Davos pow-wow of business and
political elites said it used a new methodology for the 2018 edition of its
annual Global Competitiveness Report to reflect shifts in a world
increasingly transformed by new, digital technologies.
This year’s report studied how 140 economies fared when measured against
98 indicators organised into 12 pillars, including institutions,
infrastructure, macroeconomic stability, business dynamism and innovation
capability.
“The United States achieves the best overall performance,” WEF said in a
statement.
– ‘Innovation powerhouse’ –
“They’re an innovation power house,” Saadia Zahidi, a member of the WEF’s
managing board, told AFP.
“They do well in terms of labour markets, they do well in terms of market
size, they do fairly well in terms of institutions,” she said.
When asked if President Donald Trump could take credit for the ranking,
Thierry Geiger, head of analytics and quantitive research at WEF, stressed
that most of the data used in the report was from before Trump came to power
last year.
“The things we capture are long-term drivers,” he told reporters.
Zahidi meanwhile said “there are also a lot of worrying signs” for US
competitiveness.
She pointed to the country’s low score in terms of participation by women
in the labour force, where it ranked 37th, as well as 40th place in terms of
press freedom.
WEF also stressed the “importance of openness for competitiveness,”
including low-tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade and ease of hiring
foreign labour.
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“The data suggest that global economic health would be positively impacted
by a return to greater openness and integration,” WEF said.
Overall, the United States scored an average of 85.6 points when the
nearly 100 indicators were measured on a scale of 0 to 100, and was followed
by Singapore and Germany.
Switzerland meanwhile landed in fourth place, with a score of 82.6, after
nine years at the top of the WEF ranking.
On average, countries around the world scored 60 points on the ranking —
a full 40 points away from what WEF considers the optimal conditions for a
competitive economy.
WEF founder Klaus Schwab said understanding and being open to the
technologies driving the so-called “fourth industrial revolution” was vital
to a country’s competitiveness.
“I foresee a new global divide between countries who understand innovative
transformations and those that don’t,” he said in a statement.
Zahidi however stressed that “technology is not a silver bullet on its
own.”
“Countries must invest in people and institutions to deliver on the
promise of technology.”
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