Switzerland no longer most competitive economy

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17.10.2018
Statistics

Switzerland slips to 4th place in the revamped World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report. Reasons include a lack of entrepreneurial culture and a weakness in implementing disruptive ideas.

The Forum’s 2018 report uses new methodology to understand the full impact of the fourth industrial revolution, and finds factors including human capital, agility, resilience, openness and innovation becoming increasingly important. The new tool maps the competitiveness landscape of 140 economies through 98 indicators organised into 12 pillars. For each indicator, using a scale from 0 to 100, it indicates how close an economy is to the ideal state or “frontier” of competitiveness. When combining these factors, the United States achieves the best overall performance with a score of 85.6, ahead of Singapore and Germany. 

Switzerland slipped to 4th place. This confirms a downward trend which was already outlined in IMD World Competitiveness Ranking 2018. Switzerland performs poor in five of the twelve pillars:

  • ICT adoption (Switzerland is ranked 15th),
  • macroeconomic stability (36th),
  • product and market – this pillar includes indicators for domestic competition and trade openness (16th),
  • market size (39th) and 
  • business dynamism (20th).

For start-ups the pillar “business dynamism” deserves a closer look. It includes an indicator for the entrepreneurial culture and indicators such as “growth of innovative companies” and “companies embracing disruptive ideas”. Although Switzerland performs still strong concerning innovation - according to the Forum’s press release “countries such as Germany and Switzerland set the global standards for innovation” - the report finds weaknesses when it comes to using disruptive ideas to improve productivity and to generate growth.

(SK)

1Comments

Daniel CEFAI @ 23.10.2018 17:26

CH poor in "implementing disruptive ideas" .. so quid novi sub sole ? Seems people have hidden behind only technology and claimed they are the best … That's not the only rule of the game !

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