India’s Competitiveness Rankings

How competitive do you think India is when compared to other countries?

If you are thinking India is better placed than most of the other countries, you are wrong. India is ranked a lowly 49th in the world when it comes to competitiveness !

A comprehensive report released by World Economic Forum (WEF) ranks 133 economies on various parameters to arrive at Competitiveness rankings.

Switzerland has overtaken USA to become the most competitive economy in the world, followed by United States, Singapore, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Canada and Netherlands in that order respectively !

The Top 50 Competitive Economies in the world

Here are some of the highlights of the report:

India Specific Key indicators

• Population (millions), 2008…………………………….1,186.2
• GDP (US$ billions), 2008……………………………….1,209.7
• GDP per capita (US$), 2008 …………………………..1,016.2
• GDP (PPP) as share (%) of world total, 2008 …..…….4.77

GDP per Capita

The most problematic factors for doing business in India

(click on picture to see details)

With the kind of Population we have, I dont think we can ever overcome the fact that, India will always be behind when it comes to Infrastructure. But like China has shown, it can be improved to a large extent – not sure when will we see it.

After Infrastructure, biggest hurdles to do business in India is Government Bureaucracy and Corruption. Can we ever do away with them?

Here are the individual parameter rankings based on which the total competitiveness is derived from:

if you see the above chart, India ranks very well when it comes to its market size – yeah we are big :), but thats it. Even today, some 42 percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day (in PPP international dollars), more than twice China’s equivalent figure.

India surprisingly,  ranks well on innovation and sophistication factors, which are actually forte of more developed and richer countries. It ranks an outstanding 28th in the most complex areas measured by the business sophistication and innovation subindex, ahead of several advanced economies.

India also boasts fairly well functioning institutions (54th), bustling financial markets (16th), and a sound banking sector (25th)

However, India ranks very poorly on some of the basic determinants of competitiveness, namely health and primary education (101st), macroeconomic stability (96th) and infrastructure (76th).

The biggest surprise to me however was the penetration rates of Mobile Telephony – India is ranked at 116th out of 133 countries, so much for being 2nd largest mobile phone market !

Penetration of Internet and personal computers are also one of the lowest with a ranking of 104th and 96th respectively.

Take that for Indian competitiveness !

You can download full 492 page report for all countries from here.

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Author: Arun Prabhudesai

Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin or get in touch with him at admin-at-trak-dot-in or 91.9822575676.

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