India moves up in competitive strength

India may well have managed to improve its global competitive strength in the last one year, but in terms of its much hyped technological ad...

India may well have managed to improve its global competitive strength in the last one year, but in terms of its much hyped technological advancement, it still remains at 57th position.

According to a Growth Competitive Index (GCI) Report for the year 2002, released by World Economic Forum on Tuesday, India has improved its GCI ranking to 48 position in 2002 compared to its 57th position in 2001. The other emerging market economy China though remains at 63 in terms of technology index rating—in terms of its GCI, China has improved its competitive strength to 33 rank in 2002 compared to 39th rank in 2001.

The report also noted that despite of doing well on the technology dimension, countries like Argentina and Turkey have declined substantially to 63 and 69 respectively. Tunisia is the highest new entrant at number 34 owing its ranking to moderately good performance on macroeconomic variables.

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This year’s ranking show that US remains the most competitive nations swapping positions with Finland, last year’s number one and now ranked second followed by Taiwan, Singapore and Sweden.

While Singapore has retained its fourth rank, Taiwan and Sweden enjoy a significant improvement of three and four positions, respectively.

The US owes its position mainly to its performance on technology front. Finland also enjoys a very high level of technological advancement, being ranked third in terms of competitiveness. However, Finland has slipped slightly in terms of macro-economic environment. Taiwan’s high overall score also results primarily from its very high position on the technology front, whereas Singapore’s strengths are found specially in the macro-economic area. The report has also examined the underlying conditions defining the sustainable level of productivity in each of the 80 countries as microeconomic competitive index (MICI). According to this, US has again taken leading position over Finland after two years of being ranked second.

India has lost its position by one rank to 37 but the largest increase, has been achieved by Malaysia, reflecting improvements in a number of dimensions including rules governing competition, value chain presence, branding and the nature of competitive advantage.