Revamp costs Swiss

GENEVA: , Switzerland’s nineyear streak as the world’s most competitive economy came to an end yesterday, dethroned by the United States in an annual league table published by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

A rootandbranch revamp of the WEF’s rankings, reoriented towards future technologydriven growth, pushed Switzerland into fourth place, with Singapore second and Germany third out of 140 countries, each marked on a scale from 0 to 100.

‘‘The US scores 85.6, which essentially means it’s still about 14 points away from that frontier of competitiveness,’’ said Saadia Zahidi, a member of the WEF’s managing board.

The United States was ‘‘an innovation powerhouse’’ with flexible labour, Zahidi said.

‘‘They do fairly well in terms of institutions but there are also a lot of worrying signs,’’ she said.

‘‘The US is one of the lowest ranked G20 economies when it comes to health; there are concerns about freedom of the press; there are concerns about judicial independence.’’

The old rankings docked marks from the United States for its macroeconomic environment, high government debt being a weakness. But the new rankings awarded it 99.2 for ‘‘debt dynamics’’, an almost perfect score.

New Zealand came in at number 18 on 77.5.

The bottom 30 were mainly African countries, although Haiti and Yemen were ahead of lastplaced Chad, which scored 35.5.