Statsguru: India ranks 58th on WEF's global competitiveness index

India ranks 58th out of 140 countries on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) global competitiveness rankings, 2018. The United States leads the latest rankings, followed by Singapore, Germany, Switzerland and Japan. As seen in Chart 1, India ranks behind other emerging economies such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.  

The global competitiveness rankings are based on a country’s performance on four sub-indices, namely enabling environment, human capital, markets and the innovation ecosystem it offers (Chart 2). Performance on each of these sub-indices is in turn measured through select indicators. 

As shown in Chart 3, India fares poorly on human capital, ranking 108th and 96th on health and skills, respectively. Japan and Singapore are tied for the first place on health, while the US, which leads the overall rankings, fares poorly on health, ranking 47th. 

Under the broad rubric of enabling environment, Singapore leads the rankings on infrastructure, while Germany ranks highest on macro-economic stability. 

In comparison, India ranks 63rd on infrastructure and 49th on macro-economic stability (Chart 4).

On business dynamism and innovation capability, as seen in Chart 5, India does relatively well, ranking 58th and 31st, respectively. But on product and labour markets, India fares poorly, ranking 110th and 75th, respectively. By comparison, as seen in Chart 4, China ranks 55th on product market and 69th on labour market. US ranks 1st on labour market, while Singapore leads the ranking on product market. 

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