DOHA: Qatar has maintained its 10th position among 60 countries, most of them being developed economies, in ‘The World Competitiveness Scoreboard 2013’, an annual exercise conducted by the Switzerland-based International Institute for Management Development (IMD) that publishes ‘World Competitiveness Yearbook’ (WCY).
The top three in the list are US, Switzerland and Hong Kong. The US has regained the number one spot, thanks to a rebounding financial sector, an abundance of technological innovation and successful companies.
The survey conducted during the first quarter of 2013, measure how well countries manage their economic and human resources to increase their prosperity.
Some of the developed countries such as Finland, Japan and France have stood much below Qatar in the list occupying 20th, 24th and 28th positions, respectively.
Qatar, in its efforts to transform the hydrocarbon rich country into a diversified economy, has sought to expand and develop investment friendly business environment by creating greater space for the private sector businesses. The report noted that Qatar is continuing to attract and retain international talent in the pursuit of a knowledge-based society.
The Year Book says that Qatar has been able to meet the challenges to improve and develop in various areas led by education for capacity building and individual’s skill development to improve the situation of labour force in the country.
The IMD’s World Competitiveness Center has been calculating the competitiveness of nations since 1989. In 1997, the globalisation of the world’s economy led it to move from a split ranking (advanced vs emerging economies) to an integrated one. Because the robust methodology has been maintained since then, it is now possible to track a country’s competitiveness evolution over that period of time.
Among the 15 evaluating indicators, Qatar has emerged with five key attractive factors, scoring relatively higher than many other developed economies, such as political stability (64 percent), dynamic economy (58 percent) and infrastructure (49 percent). The other positive factors that have made Qatar more competitive for doing business than others include easy access to funding and effective legal environment with 48 and 38.7 percent scores, respectively.
Some of the other factors in which Qatar has scored fairly good includes education, health, employment and local as well as international trade and investments.
Last year, Qatar ranked 11th, with an impressive jump of three positions, among 144 economies in the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), another annual exercise conducted by the Davos-based World Economic Forum (WEF). The energy-rich economy stood just one rank behind Japan (10th) and ahead of Denmark (12th), two of the most developed economies of the world in 2012.
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