SA’s rise in global competitive index is reason to smile

Brand South Africa has welcomed South Africa’s rise in the annual World Economic Forum’s Global Competitive Index. South Africa now stands at 47 of 138 – up from 49 in 2015 – countries measured on 12 pillars.

We asked ZAR Forex Report writer and local resident, Global Forex manager Herman Howell to break it down in layman’s terms.

SA jumps two places on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Competitive Index (GCI).

Pardon? The above certainly is a mouthful – if we used acronyms, as so many people like to do, it looks even more confusing.

The WEF releases the GCI every year and it “assesses the ability of countries to provide high levels of prosperity to their citizens”.

Basically, it measures how effective a country uses its available resources.

So how did SA do? How “competitive” are we compared to other nations?
Not too badly, actually. South Africa came in at 47 of 138 – up from 49 in 2015, so a slight improvement (although the list is slightly shorter).

So if you can imagine a table consisting of a 138 countries where Switzerland, Singapore, the US, Germany and the Netherlands are the top ranked countries and Yemen, Mauritania, Chad, Burundi, and Malawi are the worst ranked, then we fit in close to the top third. Right between Portugal and Bahrain and two places behind Mauritius, the top African country.

Boringly obvious to the point of being funny, this means we are more stable and more developed than a third-world country but less-stable and less-developed than a first-world country.

Twelve fields or pillars are measured ranging from health care, education and infrastructure to business sophistication and innovation.

According to the 2016 study, South Africa has demonstrated sustained improvements in its performance from 2015.  The Nation Brand has improved in 10 of the 12 pillars:

1. Goods & Market Efficiency – 10 positions (28/138 countries)
2. Labour Market Efficiency – 10 positions (97/138 countries)
3. Higher Education & Training – 6 positions (77/138 countries)
4. Macro-economic environment – 6 positions (79/138 countries)
5. Innovation – 3 positions (35/138 countries)
6. Infrastructure – 4 positions (64 of 138 countries)
7. Health & Primary Education – 3 positions (126 of 138 countries)
8. Business Sophistication – 3 positions (30 of 138 countries)
9. Financial Market Development – 1 position (11 of 138 countries)
10. Technological Readiness – 1 position (49 of 138 countries)

In all fields we did much better than previous years, except for…public institutions and market size.

For fear of calling the government corrupt, we will just mention that we could spend and use resources better in our public institutions and that more has to be done to export goods and increase our market share.

All in all, something positive and while we cannot yet compare against the Switzerland’s of the world, we did much better than many other developing countries in Latin America, Asia and Europe.

So there you have it, a reason to smile!

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