U.S. tops revised competitiveness ranking for 1st time since 2008

GENEVA — Organizers of the annual Davos conference in Switzerland ranked the United States first in their ranking of the world’s most competitive economies for the first time in a decade Wednesday, saying the No. 1 spot reflects a new methodology and longterm factors more than recent policies of the Trump administration.

The World Economic Forum said its “Global Competitiveness Report” is based on nearly 100 separate factors in a dozen categories that have been reworked slightly to better reflect today’s rapidly changing, increasingly digitized world economy.

The U.S. is followed by Singapore, Germany, Switzerland and Japan in the top five spots among the 140 economies considered. In nearly 40 years of the group’s rankings on competitiveness, the U.S. previously earned top honors in 2008.

Switzerland last year.

Nearly all of the top 30 performers are developed economies in Asia and Europe, along with Israel at 20, the United Arab Emirates, 27; China, 28; and Qatar, 30. Many African countries again lagged, and they have shown few signs of significant improvement, forum analysts said.

The authors tweaked the index this year to account in part for the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, changes in human capital was No. and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — the forum’s buzzword for the digital revolution that is disrupting nearly every industry around the globe at a breakneck pace.

The main takeaway of this revised edition is that no single factor makes a country stand out, and each nation should find its route to developing and improving, the authors said.

“If anything, this report is saying there are no silver bullets,” said Saadia Zahidi, the forum’s managing director in charge of economic and social agenda. “We used to say: ‘You have to compete on the basis of your lowskilled labor. You need to industrialize first then you need to bring in other aspects of growth and competitiveness.’ That model no longer exists, not in a world where you have cheaper capital and cheaper technology than ever before.”

Zahidi said that though the U.S. scored 85.6 out of 100, there was still room for improvement, and pointed to some “worrying signs.”

While the U.S. fared well in areas for business dynamism, financial system and innovation, it did less well on areas such as security — like its high homicide rate for a developed country.

“It’s a country that is doing extremely well in terms of its labor market dynamism overall, but workers’ rights remain low,” Zahidi said. “Active labor market policies are also somewhat missing as compared to other advanced economies.”