Answer: Both
by Steuart Pennington
In this newsletter I will do two things:
First, I will track our improvements and our slippages over the past five years;
Second, I will compare how we do against other developing economies, namely Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC).
Background
The World Competitiveness Yearbook (WCY) is produced by the Swiss business school, IMD, (as opposed to the Global Competitiveness Report, (GCR) produced by the World Economic Forum). It ranks 59 countries in terms of their relative competitiveness – that is, how effectively each nation’s economic environment creates and sustains commercial enterprises. SA is ranked at 50th, up from 52nd in 2011. It is based on an Executive Opinion survey of 4000 participants across the 59 countries, or +/- 65 execs in each country. The results are therefore based on perception. We all know that perception is reality . No doubt the executives surveyed knew much more about Greece’s (58th) national debt crisis – more so than they did of Ireland (20th), Spain (39th), Italy (40th) and Portugal (41st)!
The perennial problem with perceptions
Clearly the perceptions of executives in one country will differ from those in other countries based on their experience, the country’s history, political leadership, the media and the issues of the day. As a consequence there are some significant differences between the findings of the World Competitiveness Yearbook (WCY), based on perception, and the Global Competitiveness Report (GCR), based on measurement. A good example of this is physical (basic) infrastructure – in the WCY we rank 55/59, in the GCR we rank 41/142.
