Vietnam improves the most among 141 economies, up 10 places to rank 67th in terms of competitiveness, according to the latest Global Competitiveness Report 2019 recently released by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Vietnam's indicators. Source: WEF's report.
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Out of the 12 pillars that made up the assessment, Vietnam scored the highest with 81 points in Health, ranking 71st in this field, while the lowest was innovation capability with 37 points at rank 76th.
The ranking maps the competitiveness landscape of 141 economies through 103 indicators organized into 12 themes.
Each indicator, using a scale from 0 to 100, shows how close an economy is to the ideal state or “frontier” of competitiveness. The pillars, which cover broad socio-economic elements, are: institutions, infrastructure, ICT adoption, macroeconomic stability, health, skills, product market, labor market, the financial system, market size, business dynamism and innovation capability.
In this year's report, the US lost the top spot to Singapore as the most competitive economy, scoring 83.7 points and while the ASEAN country earned 84.8 points.
Other economies in the top 10 ranking are Hong Kong (3rd), the Netherlands (4th), Switzerland (5th), Japan (6th), Germany (7th), Sweden (8th), the UK (9th) and Denmark (10th).
The WEF considered the East Asia and the Pacific region the most competitive in the world, followed by Europe and North America.
The report focused on the issue of world’s low productivity 10 years after global financial crisis. “The world economy remains locked in a cycle of low or flat productivity growth despite the injection of more than US$10 trillion by central banks,” stated the WEF.
Although loose monetary policy mitigated the negative effects of the global financial crisis, it may have also contributed to reducing productivity growth by encouraging capital misallocation, the WEF suggested.
Last month, Vietnam’s General Statistics Office (GSO) released the official economic data showing the country’s GDP growth of 6.98% in the first nine months of 2019, the highest growth rate over the last nine years for a nine-month performance.
Such positive result was made although the country’s economy has one of the world’s highest levels of openness, while growth of global trade is slowing down and a number of regional peers experiencing a slower-than-expected economic growth.
