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Vietnam falls two grades in global competitiveness report
The World Economic Forum (WEF) on October 8 released the 2008 global competitiveness report, which shows Vietnam falling two grades to 70th.
The US still tops the ranking in the competitiveness report thanks to high productivity, high creativeness and the ability to apportion strength in the most effective way.
However, experts say that if the latest happenings of the US financial crisis had been considered, the ranking of the US would not be as high as it is in the report.
The list of the top 10 countries which have the highest competitiveness does not see big changes this year, as people can see the familiar names like the US, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan. Canada has joined the top 10, while the UK, though remaining very competitive, has dropped three places and out of the top 10, which is attributed mainly to the weakening of its banking system.
Singapore has jumped from 7th to 5th, exchanging places with Germany, which has fallen from 5th to 7th. The country has the highest ranking among Asian countries. The country is highly praised for its good infrastructure and ranks second in the world in terms of the efficiency of three markets: the commodity, labour and finance markets. The three biggest weaknesses of Singapore are small market scale, big gap between input and output interest rates and the debt ratio of the government.
Vietnam ranked 64th in 2006, 68th in 2007 and 70th in 2008. However, the 2008 list sees some additional countries. WEF points out that if the newly listed countries had not been added, Vietnam would have fallen by one grade only, from 68th to 69th.
Among Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam is only above the Philippines and Cambodia (Laos and Myanmar have not been added into the global competitiveness report).
Experts say that the three biggest problems of Vietnam are high inflation, poor infrastructure and lack of skilled labourers.
There are four nations which were less competitive than Vietnam in the 2007 report but have surpassed Vietnam in the 2008 report. These include Botswana, which jumped from 76th to 56th, Brazil, 72nd to 64th, Montenegro, 82nd to 65th, and Romania, 74th to 68th.
Meanwhile, two countries which were more competitive than Vietnam in 2007 have seen sharp falls in the 2008 report: El Salvador, from 67th to 79th, and Morocco, from 64th to 73rd.
The Vietnamese partners involved in the process of the report compilation were the Central Institute of Economic Management (CIEM) and the HCM City Economics Institute.
VNN
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