India has slipped one rank below to 31st in the annual World Competitiveness Yearbook (WCY) among the top 58 nations of the world. Singapore is at the top followed by Hong Kong while United States has slipped to the third slot. China has improved its position to the 18th position.
Surprisingly, four Asian nations have now made it to the top—the positions dominated by Europe earlier. Only three European nations have made it to the top 10. The remaining two are US, Canada and Australia. The scenario is thus visibly different from that of 2009 when six of the 10 top nations were from Europe . Asia then had only two nations to its credit.
Though the number of nations ranked by the International Institute of Management Development (IMD)?which brings out the yearbook?has gone up from 57 in 2009 to 58 in 2010, a comparison of the rankings shows that a major causalities was the US economy, whose ranking has slipped from the first to the third position.
In contrast, Singapore traversed the opposite direction moving from third to the
first position.
However, among the top-ranked countries, the greatest gains were made by Taiwan, which moved from the 23rd position to the eighth position and Malaysia which pushed its way from 18th to the 10th position. The gains of other nations like Australia, Canada and Norway were only marginal while the rankings of Hong Kong , Switzerland and Sweden remained stable. The others in the top ten are Switzerland , Australia , Sweden , Canada, Taiwan, Norway and Malaysia respectively.
Though India?s ranking slipped from the a notch from the 30th position last year, it still did better than Brazil and Russia which were ranked in the 38th and 51st position respectively.
India?s low ranking among the 58 nations?which is even below the midway mark?however, improves considerably when it is ranked among countries with population of more than 20 million.
Here India is ranked 13th among 29 nations?just a notch below Japan in the 12th position, three notches below France at 10th position and four notches below Korea in the eighth position.
What is worrisome is the sharply different trends in India?s factor rankings in the four sub-sectors relating to economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency and infrastructure. While the ranking relating to government efficiency which includes fiscal management and business legislation has gone up from the 35th to the 30th position over the two years that of infrastructure has improved from the 57th to the 54th position.
However, the trend has been reversed in the other two sub-sectors with India?s ranking in business efficiency (relating
to productivity, management practices among others) slipping from 11th to the 17th position in business efficiency
and falling even more sharply from the 12th to the 20th position in economic performance, which relates to areas like
trade, investments, employment and prices.
