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Question: What does the Global Competitiveness Report measure?
Jennifer Blanke: In the Global Competitiveness Report, what we are trying
to measure is the productivity of countries. Why are we interested in productivity?
Because productivity sets the sustainable level of prosperity that can be earned for
a country's citizens. And so we are looking at a number of
factors that actually drive productivity that range from the more basic to the more complex.
So we're looking at things like governance and institutions,
macroeconomic stability, infrastructure, health, education, of course, also the functioning
of markets, goods, labor, financial markets, and for the most advanced
economies, we are also looking at things like innovation and the sophistication of
the business sector. Question: What are the key findings in
this year's report?
Jennifer Blanke: We are covering a record number of 142 countries this year, and in
fact, that cover all of the world's regions.
And some of the things that come out of the report are, for example, if you look
at Europe, we are seeing that seven of the ten most competitive economies in the
world are European economies. The United States has continued to go down
in the rankings to fifth position. The United States is one of the top five
most competitive economies in the world for a number of reasons,
particularly given that it's the world's innovation powerhouse. On the other hand, there have been
a number of weakenings across various areas, in particular, related to the fiscal
environment, fiscal weakening, and the apparent inability of policymakers to
really deal with this issue, and this has been eroding also at the confidence in
policymakers in the country over the past few years.
If you look at the large emerging markets, you see that China still leads the large
emerging market BRIC economies. And looking at the other BRIC economies,
we are seeing also, as well as China, Brazil, South Africa continuing to rise in
the ranking this year.
Question: What other trends does the report reveal?
Jennifer Blanke: Well, one of the things that we are looking at is the fact that
fiscal imbalances that have been building up around the world are really a danger to
future competitiveness in terms of the ability of countries to be able to invest
in those things that will be very important for competitiveness going
forward, things like education, infrastructure, and so on.
So that's one sort of danger zone that we're noting, and it does echo some of the
findings that came out in our Global Risk Report earlier in the year.
On a more positive note, we have been noticing a convergence among emerging
economies and advanced economies where we see that over recent years, there has been
a closing of a gap between the emerging economies and the OECD economies.
Question: What makes this edition of the report so relevant?
Jennifer Blanke: Over the past year, in fact, we've been looking at a new issue,
which is the whole concept of sustainability and how it relates to competitiveness.
And we've been working with top experts over the past year in order to integrate
the concept of sustainability more strongly into the Global Competitiveness
Report. Now, what this means is that we're trying
to basically see the kinds of vulnerabilities that might affect
competitiveness over the longer term, and really, whether countries are putting into
place both what they need for competitiveness over the shorter term
and the longer term in terms of changing demographics, environmental damage, and so
on and so forth. So we see this as a long-term research
effort and we do encourage our readers to provide feedback to us in order to
continue to improve over time.