Singapore has reclaimed its spot as the world's most competitive economy, an accolade it last won in 2010, reports The Straits Times.
The Lion City jumped from third place last year to first, switching places with the United States, which slipped from top spot to third. For the previous four years, Singapore had hovered around the third or fourth place.
The ranking, by Swiss business school IMD, evaluates the extent to which a country fosters an environment where enterprises can achieve sustainable growth, generate jobs and increase welfare for its citizens.
The IMD World Competitiveness Rankings, established in 1989, incorporate 235 indicators from each of the 63 ranked economies. The ranking takes into account a wide range of “hard” statistics such as unemployment, GDP and government spending on health and education, as well as “soft” data from an Executive Opinion Survey covering topics such as social cohesion, globalization and corruption.
This information feeds into four categories – economic performance, infrastructure, government efficiency and business efficiency – to give a final score for each country.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for competitiveness, but the best performing countries tend to score well across all four categories.
Rounding up the list of the top five most competitive economies were Switzerland, which moved one place up to fourth, and the United Arab Emirates.
It was the first time in the top five for the latter, ranked 15th as recently as in 2016.
As for in Southeast Asia, herewith is spots within the world ranking
- Singapore (World Rank = 1)
- Malaysia (22)
- Thailand (25)
- Indonesia (32)
- Philippines (46)
Source : Straits Times | IMD World’s Competitive Rankings Official Report
