Kuwait is absent from the Global Competitiveness Index for the year 2022, for the fourth year in a row, since the last classification of the country on the index was in 2018, when it ranked 54th globally.
The index, issued by the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), based in Switzerland, measures the competitiveness of 63 countries across 4 main axes: economic performance, government efficiency, and the effectiveness of the business environment and infrastructure, aiming to analyze the ability of countries to create, maintain and develop a supportive and stimulating environment for competitiveness, reports a local Arabic daily.
For the sixth year in a row, the UAE maintained its leadership regionally, ranking first in the Middle East and North Africa region, despite the decline in its rating by 3 places falling to 12th globally.
The UAE has outsmarted countries such as Luxembourg, Canada, Germany, China, Austria, Australia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, France and Japan, while it ranked first globally in 19 indicators, and ranked first in the world in 62 indicators, and among the top ten globally in 100 indicators, out of a total of 334 indicators covered by the report this year.
Qatar ranked second regionally after the UAE, to come in 18th globally, followed by Saudi Arabia, which advanced by an average of 8 places, to be ranked third regionally and 24th globally, after it was ranked 32nd globally in 2021. Bahrain, which enters the report for the first time this year ranked 30th globally, while Jordan ranked 56th, down seven places from last year.
At the global level Denmark dethroned Switzerland, taking the first rank in the world, advancing from third place followed by Singapore in third place.
The “Corona” pandemic topped the report accompanying the index this year, due to its enormous negative consequences on local economies, especially those that impose restrictions on the movement of individuals and businesses, in addition to the increase in new mutations after it was thought that “Corona” was disappearing.
“It is clear that inflationary pressures are exacerbating bottlenecks in supply chains around the world, and they are affecting the performance of most of the economies covered by the report,” said Christos Kapolis, chief economist at IMD’s Center for Global Competitiveness.
He added that among the other global challenges that have an impact on the competitiveness of countries are the “Corona” mutants that appear with different severity in relation to the number of infected people around the world, and the restrictions they carry with them, and the difference in national policies in dealing with the pandemic (the policy of leniency or imposing severe restrictions), and the Russia-Ukraine War.