Bangladesh ranks 107th in global competitiveness index

Bangladesh's competitiveness among global economies has slightly improved to 107 out of 109 in rankings published yearly by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The country ranked 107 this year, from last year's position 109, among 140 countries in the world, Xinhua news agency cited WEF report as saying.

Bangladesh's leading think-tank Centro for Policy Dialogue (CPD) disclosed the ranking on behalf of the Geneva-based body at a press conference in Dhaka on Wednesday.

The report says the list of top 10 countries including Switzerland, Singapore, the US, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, China's Hong Kong, Finland, Sweden and Britain remain unchanged but rankings of a few countries have changed.

In Europe, Spain, Italy, Portugal and France have made significant strides in bolstering competitiveness.

Among BRICS countries, it said three economies including Russia (45th) South Africa (49th) and India (55th) advanced, while China remained in last year's position (28th) and Brazil (75th) decelerated.

Among other South Asian countries, Sri Lanka performs well. It has achieved improvement by five notches and attained the 68th position in GCR-2015 compared to the 73rd last year.

Pakistan ranked 126th in 2015, Nepal 100th, and Bhutan 105th, the report said.

Regarding Bangladesh, the report says the country has advanced mainly due to better performance in "basic requirements" but at the cost of weakening "efficiency enhancers".

Apart from this, it said "major problematic factors like infrastructure, corruption and weak management remain the same."