Reforms underway contribute to improvement
AMMAN - Jordan's ranking in the annual global competitiveness index has jumped by seven notches this year to the 64th spot out of 144 countries.
In the 2012-2013 Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) that was released by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Kingdom's latest performance followed two years of decline. Last year, Jordan's ranking was 71 out of 142 countries.
The Kingdom came in 64th position after it registered an overall score of 4.23 points out of seven points across 12 categories used in the report to assess the ranking of covered countries.
The 12 pillars are: institutions, infrastructure, macro-economic environment, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labour market efficiency, financial market development, technological readiness, market size, business sophistication and innovation.
Jordan's improved ranking this year was a result of improvements made in the majority of the pillars that measure overall performance.
The WEF report highlighted that the improvement in the Kingdom's position is also due to what it called "partial" reforms.
"The Middle East and North Africa region continues to be affected by political turbulence that has impacted individual countries' competitiveness," WEF said in the report.
"Countries that embarked on partial reforms such as Jordan and Morocco moved up in the rankings, while economies that were more significantly affected by unrest and political transformations tend to drop or stagnate in terms of national competitiveness," the WEF said in its report.
In the "institutions" pillar, Jordan went up to 42nd spot in this year's report from 45th place last year and to the 60th position in "infrastructure", while in the health and primary education category the Kingdom's ranking jumped to 56th from 72nd place in the 2011-2012 report.
Major leaps were achieved in the fields of innovation with the Kingdom's ranking going up to 57th place from 77th the year before.
In the category of business sophistication, Jordan ranked 55th while in last year's report it landed in the 68th spot, according to the report, which was made available to The Jordan Times.
While maintaining its 65th place in the category of financial market development, the country's ranking also improved in the fields of goods and market efficiency this year to 44 from 54, higher education and training to 55 from 59 and market size to 84 from 88, in addition to improvement in the pillar of labour market efficiency which improved from 107 to 101.
In the infrastructure category, Jordan's spot saw a slight drop to 60th place from 59th in last year's index. In the macroeconomic environment category, ranking also went down to 112th position from 97th, the report indicated.
A major drop in ranking was registered at the technological readiness pillar, with Jordan coming in 69th from 59th last year.
The WEF said in its 545-page report that modest growth rates that the Kingdom has achieved over the past four years were not sufficient to create the employment necessary to absorb about 60,000 new entrants into the labour market every year.
"Boosting growth over the longer term to levels that would result in sustainable job creation will require Jordan's policy makers to address a number of challenges," the report said, adding that stabilising the macroeconomic environment should remain on the agenda and should be accompanied by growth-enhancing structural reforms.
According to the GCI, there is significant room for improvements in terms of labour market efficiency, while the full potential of ICT for productivity improvements has not yet been exploited.
Jordan could also benefit from more openness to international trade and investment, which would trigger efficiency gains in the domestic economy as well as transfer of knowledge and technology, the report added.
In regards to global ranking, Switzerland tops the overall ranking in the competitiveness report, followed by Singapore, Finland and Sweden.
The US economy fell from fifth to seventh place.
In terms of ranking among Arab countries, Jordan moved to 7th from 8th in the report, which ranked Qatar in 11th position worldwide followed by Saudi Arabia (18), the United Arab Emirates (24), Oman (32), Bahrain (35) and Kuwait (37).
In 2010, following a sharp drop in the GCI, the government formed a national team to discuss and address the decline in Jordan's ranking by taking into consideration the pillars measured in the global report.
© Jordan Times 2012
