November 01, 2019
The World Economic Forum’s “Global Competitiveness Report 2019” has demoted Iran by 10 places, so Iran now ranks 99th out of a total of 141 countries surveyed.
This year’s Global Competitiveness Report is the latest edition of the series launched in 1979, which provides an annual assessment of the drivers of productivity and growth.
With a score of 84.8, Singapore was the world’s most competitive economy in 2019, overtaking the United States, which falls to second place, followed by Hong Kong (third), Netherlands (fourth) and Switzerland (fifth).
The annual report maps the competitiveness landscape of 141 economies through 103 indicators organized into 12 themes. Each indicator, using a scale of 0 to 100, shows how close an economy is to the ideal state of competitiveness.
Of the 103 indicators, Iran scored best, 15th place, in “research institutions prominence” and in 16th place for “energy efficiency regulation.” But it scored 141st or absolute last in “banks regulatory capital ratio as a percentage of total risk-related assets” and 140th or next-to-last in labor markets, one of the study’s 12 themes.