World competitiveness

The latest World Competitiveness Yearbook is now available. While such rankings do need to be taken, somewhat, with a grain of salt, they do nonetheless contain some useful information. The IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook measures 55 countries, including New Zealand, on the basis of 331 criteria.

The scoreboard for this year has the USA at 1, Singapore at 2 and Hong Kong at 3. New Zealand comes in at 18 just below mainland China, who is at 17. Australia is at 7, Canada is at 8, while Ireland is at 12. Venezuela is last, but to be fair Zimbabwe and North Korea aren't on the list. An interesting point is that there are a series of smaller nations, like Singapore(2), Hong Kong(3), Switzerland(4) and Luxembourg(5), ahead of the larger European countries such as Germany(16), just ahead of China, and the UK (21). In that respect, given its size, the USA is an anomaly. But if smallness is an advantage why isn't New Zealand higher up the rankings? Could it be that recent government policies have be wrong?

(HT: Economic Logic)